Chapter 63
Lance
Gods, I was home.
After a small but heated discussion, the wing had agreed to stop at least for a while at Dragon Rest. While Kael was adamant the safest place was his family estate, the promise of a warm bed and a hot bath less than an hour from the city won the day.
As I slid from Viridian’s back, I found my head was still spinning.
The general was this fixture in my life, good or bad, and now…
I shook my head, ready to deal with the future, not the past, when Viridian went walking off.
Where are you going, lad? I asked. Viridian?
“So you’ve decided to show your face, have you?”
The sharp voice had me turning around to see Billy and Harley standing there, arms crossed.
“Been a while, Lance.” Harley looked me up and down, frowning when he saw my corp uniform. “I can see why.”
“No, you can’t.” I moved, holding out a hand to help Fern down because something inside me couldn’t settle until I was touching her. They watched my arm curl around my girl’s waist, then pull her into my side. “Fern, this is Harley and Billy. Jenkins—”
“Is still out in the forest.” Billy’s chin jerked up. “Not that you’d know.” He peered past the two of us. “Found yourself a queen dragon after all, did ya?”
“If you mean Viridian found his mate…” My dragon returned to the fold, holding something in his foreclaws. What do you have there, lad?
For you, my queen.
A flash of something bright, I caught that as he offered the gem to Auren, and I wondered how she would respond. After what she’d been though, surely the queen dragon would prefer a nice side of beef, not—
“That’s a nice bit if citrine.” Dain said so little it was still a shock hearing him speak. He craned his neck to look at it. “Carved in the shape of an eye, by the look of it.”
The answer is in the earth, Viridian said, yet again, but it was only now that statement made sense.
“Probably from the cave we found,” Harley said.
“What cave?”
He looked at Billy, nudging him in the ribs.
“Now Lance cares about what’s happening at Dragon Rest.” I ignored the dig, staring the two of them down. “We were digging down to try to find somewhere warm enough to create hatching sands. The dragons found the entrance to a cave a few days ago, something you’d know if you bothered to come by.”
“Show us.” Kael strode over, staring my childhood friends down. “Show us where this cave is.”
“Who the hell—?” Harley spluttered.
“Kael.” I stabbed my finger in his direction. “Lorien, Dain, and Fern, now, please show us this cave.”
I hadn’t slept, was looking forward to falling into bed as soon as I could, preferably with Fern beside me, but the exhaustion fell away as my friends led us over to the excavation site.
Viridian had returned to it and the other dragons joined him.
Billy and Harley’s beasts ambled over and suddenly soil was going flying through the air in massive plumes, to reveal a very familiar entrance.
“That’s just like the tomb entrance,” Fern said. “The archway. The carvings.”
“Can it be a lot less terrifying?” Lorien sighed. “After the day I’ve had, I would very much like not to feel like I’m drowning when I go into the very dark cave.”
“You could wait out here,” Fern said, taking a step towards the arch.
“Then who’s going to rescue you from the dragon revenants haunting the cave?” he asked, waggling his fingers as he pretended to be a monster.
“Me,” I said.
“Me.”
“Me.”
Fern looked back as each one of us said the same thing, her smile fading. That vulnerability that replaced it? I liked it a lot. It meant we were building enough trust for her to show her softer side. The need to let my guard down rode me hard, but right now, she turned back to the cave entrance.
“So we—”
“Let us go first.” She stepped back in surprise as Dain landed on the ground before her, then pulled his sword. “You don’t know if the cave is stable or whether the pathway is safe to walk.”
“So I should watch you fall to your death?” she said, hands going to her hips.
“She seems feisty, this Fern.” Billy nodded at me. “A good fit for you. I’ll have to introduce her to Florrie when she gets home from the market.”
And just like that, the hatchet was buried. My oldest friends and my newest ones followed our dragons into the cave complex.
“What are…?” Fern stopped several steps in to peer at the walls. Harley lit a lantern that was stashed just inside the cave for just this purpose and he held it up against the carved stone.
“Seems like some kind of family tree of sorts,” he told us. “It goes all the way down as far as I can tell. This is a gold queen, and those males look like the silver beasts you brought with you.”
He nodded to the dragons who looked over our shoulders at the artwork.
“Initially, we thought the silver was painted with pigment to make it look like a blue or bronze or red dragon,” Billy added. “Didn’t even know silver dragons existed.”
“They haven’t for some time,” Dain said, moving further down the ramp. “Silver mates with gold.”
As we’ve been saying all this time.
That had to be Slate who made that comment. Auren snorted, then followed Dain, her eyes raking across the wall. A foreclaw went out, the citrine sparkling in the dim light, right before she pressed it into the socket of a massive beast. Then she stepped back and stared at the new artwork.
“That one’s gotta be an exaggeration,” Harley scoffed. “No dragon gets that big. Not even your silvers—”
It’s a white-gold queen, Auren said in awed tones.
“White gold?” my friends spluttered. “What the hell is one of them? Queen dragons only come in yellow gold, I mean gold.”
The future.
All the dragons said that as once, then turned and walked deeper into the cave.
Red dragons and a huge blue one graced the walls, along with purple and black dragons.
Stylised lightning and fire licked the walls, but it was a more familial scene the dragons paused at.
A white-gold queen sat there, her silver mates clustered around her, but in her nest was something that had me moving closer.
“A green…?” Fern turned to me. “Why would a white-gold queen and silver males produce a green egg?”
It was then I remembered something Viridian said.
Lad, you said the silver dragons are your brothers.
His deep green eyes stared into mine.
They are my brothers.
But not by blood, I said. You were one of Zafira’s dragonlings, one of only two greens.
They are my brothers, he insisted.
Viridian. His fixed nature sometimes drove me to distraction, but right now I let out my breath slowly. How are the silver dragons your brothers?
We are the same. He moved forward, a claw reaching up to tap on the egg. Born of the same line.
What? I looked around the mural, trying to discover whatever he was getting from the artwork.
Gold and silver makes white-gold queens, Auren said. Gold and silver results in more silver males. Acid breathers.
Like Viridian… I frowned and then backed away. No, no, that can’t be right. I know that the corp prioritised other colours over green, but silver dragons were eradicated along with Drathnor and her sisters. They…
But it made sense, didn’t it? It felt like every eye was on me as I put two and two together.
Purple and black dragons were seen to be lighter and darker versions of the same type of dragon, all descended from one massive beast that had flown the channel thousands of years ago.
Orange, red and gold dragon colourations were like variations of each other and all breathed fire.
Blue dragons and green were the only outliers, but the blues’ ability to manipulate water and ice was tied to their common ancestor, Aisenbran.
So what if Viridian’s were a silver male and a white-gold queen?
Is that something you remember? I asked. Have you had visions of the White Death before all of this?
The answer is in the earth.
Without pausing, he turned and walked deeper into the cave.
Past mural after mural, I was barely able to glance at them as we passed by.
What was depicted there wasn’t his focus, but this.
The ramp fell away, revealing a massive expanse.
The remains of cracked shells, of mouldering bones, filled the corners of the sands, but they didn’t even rate a look.
Viridian walked over to a raised dais of stone.
And there was a nest of dragonstone, gleaming white in the gloom.
Viridian stopped short of it, curling his tail around his feet and looking as proud as a retriever that had dropped a dead bird at your feet.
“This…” Fern stepped forward. “Is this Drathnor’s nest?”
Only one way to find out. The dragons were one step ahead of us, already pricking the balls of their claws and prompting blood to well on the tips as I pulled my knife free. Fern pricked her finger, then I did the same, all five of us humans moving closer.
“Do we just touch any stone?” Lorien asked.
“Let’s see.”
I bent down and pressed a finger to the closest stone, and that’s when the world fell away and was replaced by this.
By all the gods, she was terrifying. The white-gold queen loomed above us, feeling like she only just fit into the space.
I am Drathnor, the one they call the White Death, she said, her voice booming in my head. But for you I will be Mother. As you grow, stretch and curl inside your shells, my sons and daughters, I will tell you the story of our kind…
Some time later, we humans stumbled out of the cave and into the late afternoon light. Blinking, I found it hard to reconcile the simple buildings with what I’d seen.
“That…” Lorien said with a shake of his head.
Kael blinked. “Yeah.”
“And she…”
Fern waved her hands through the air aimlessly.
“The dragons have what they need.” Dain looked back at the cave entrance, but he can’t have caught sight of our beasts.
They were all curled up in the nest, listening to the stories Drathnor had left for them.
“But right now, we need food and rest.” For the first time, he glanced at me without a scowl.
“Is that something we can procure here?”
“There’s only the one bed,” I replied, and that had Kael smiling. “But there’s a few chairs in my cottage and there should be some food. Might be something simple like porridge.”
“Porridge…” Lorien groaned. “With sugar and a little cinnamon? I can’t think of anything I want more right now.”
“That and the sleeping arrangements for tonight.” Kael looked back at me with a grin. “A wing bunks together, doesn’t it, Lieutenant?”
“Not in the same bed, they don’t.” I strode past him, then opened the front door. “Fern is still a lady.”
“She’s my lady.” As the woman herself spluttered, Kael wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her forehead. I admit, watching her slap him away had me smiling. “If its a ring you need, love, or a ceremony, I’ll have a priest here and a gold band on your hand by morning.”
“What we all need is our bedrolls,” she said. “I’ve developed a taste for sleeping out under the stars.”
“So you can snuggle into me when it gets cold? Got it.”
With a shake of my head, I let the two of them bicker before walking into the kitchen. Pots were pulled out and oats poured into a pot after I begged a bottle of milk from Florrie, who was in the house next door. As I set the pot on the fire, I watched Fern approach Lorien.
“I still can’t believe you did that…” Her hands rose and then fell again. “When you threw yourself off Slate’s back, it felt like my heart went with you.”
“It did?”
My hand stopped stirring as Lorien stepped closer. The man was gazing down at her like he couldn’t believe his luck, and why not? He was the one who saved the day. We were in this together, I was forced to remind myself.
“That leap was pure madness.” She was trying hard to be firm, but her temper seemed to evaporate as he took another step. “You could’ve fallen, could’ve died.”
“No chance of that,” he said. “Benefits of a misspent youth. I’ve thrown myself across bigger gaps than that and lived to tell the tale.”
“And you weren’t injured?” Finally, her hands came to rest on the other man’s chest and I was willing to bet he went perfectly still, just like I did, at her touch. With glancing caresses, she made a show of inspecting him. “You have to have hit the balcony terribly hard.”
“No injuries to speak of.” He tore his tunic off, then his shirt followed suit, leaving the man standing there, naked to the waist in my living room. “Look.”
If it was anyone else, I would’ve snorted at that line, but instead I felt a flush of something red hot.
Jealousy, I realised belatedly. I wanted to be the hero of the hour, even though I knew I didn’t have the skills to do what Lorien had.
He shivered as her fingers slid across his chest, making a thorough inspection, having earned every caress.
That’s what drew me closer. Fern might not be touching me, but I’d be damned if I’d stir porridge while she did someone else.
It seemed like the entire wing had the same idea.
As I set the pot aside, then moved closer, so did Kael and Dain.
“Seems like a proper inspection is in order,” Kael purred.
“Shut up, brother,” Lorien replied, but he didn’t look away for a second.
“He’s all yours.” Kael continued, unbowed. “We all are.” He nodded as I took my place beside Fern. “So, milady, maybe now’s the time to reach out and take him.”