She just hoped his mistake wasn’t so bad that it couldn’t be fixed. If he underestimated a Dreadgod and was killed, or dragged Mercy into some foolishness and enraged Malice…
Something caught the edge of her senses, and she whipped the owl’s head around. She saw a tiny red messenger construct flitting by, one of ten thousand that zipped through the city’s skies every night.
There was nothing that seemed strange about it to the eye, but it wasn’t the owl’s vision that had noticed it. It wasn’t one of the owl’s senses at all. Charity had sensed the attention of another person focusing on her, just for a moment. Another will, watching her.
But she was far away from the owl, and such senses were unreliable remotely. It was just a messenger construct anyway. Even if someone was using it to watch her, all it would see was one of her owls flying in the night sky. A common sight.
Charity cut off her connection to the owl and resolved to warn Lindon before he got himself in trouble, putting the construct out of her mind.
Back aboard Windfall, Lindon turned to Dross. “So Charity’s watching us.”
Dross giggled. [What is the use of a million eyes with wings if you don’t use them to spy?]
“That’s what Eithan would have said,” Lindon responded absently. The messenger construct Dross had hijacked to monitor his meeting with Mercy had been spotted by one of Charity’s owls.
Honestly, Lindon was impressed that Charity could sense such a brief brush of Dross’ attention. He had only glanced through the owl for a moment.
“How can we use this?” Lindon asked Dross.
As requested, Dross began to work.
Orthos had barely crawled from his egg when he first heard the stories of the black dragons.
There were holes in his memories now, eroded by time and the damage caused by the Path of Black Flame, but these were still pristine. When he would shove around his smaller siblings, his mother would stop him.
Would a black dragon do that? They were the kings of the continent; far too proud to bully the young.
When he struck down prey larger than he was and dragged it back to their cave, she would praise him. That was a hunt worthy of a dragon.
He had never been ashamed of being a turtle. Others might not recognize his value, but he knew his nobility. He was the greatest of turtles, and a descendant of dragons.
And he explained as much to Ziel as they worked together to move debris in the spacious castle his ancestors had left behind.
He hadn’t wanted to waste soulfire on transforming back to his normal size, but he couldn’t dig nearly as fast when he was only a foot from nose to tail. Now that he was larger than a human again, he could dig through the collapsed hallway at speed.
Orthos burned the debris he could, but the chunks of masonry were made to withstand black dragon’s breath, so those he grabbed in his mouth and dragged away. Ziel smashed entire collapsed walls into manageable segments or levitated them away; he was strong enough to grab them and haul them away by force, if he could get a grip on them, but some were shaped or positioned too awkwardly to move easily.
Then there was the concern that disturbing the pile too much might bring half the castle down on them.
While they worked, Orthos reminisced. When his mouth wasn’t full.
“This castle must have been built by the empress Natarianath or one of her children. She’s one of my most noble ancestors. She protected her kingdom with fang and flame, turning back the tide from the Trackless Sea again and again.”
“I see,” Ziel said.
“The wall that now protects the northern coast of the Blackflame Empire was her work.” Orthos lowered his head to roll a twenty-foot boulder that looked like it might have once been the base of a statue. “She died pierced with a thousand spears when the fish-men ambushed her from the bottom of the sea, betraying their treaty.”
“Hmmm,” Ziel said.
“I can’t recall much about this Herald grandson of hers, Noroloth, but I have heard stories of a black dragon prince who had a rivalry with a rune-using Sage. Once, she tricked her way into his cavern, pretending to have an elixir that would heal his oldest son. Instead, she poisoned him, and he was never able to sire another egg. In revenge, he found the library where she stored her scripts and torched it.”
“Uh-huh,” Ziel said.
“Not that they thought of all humans as their enemies, of course. The difference between black and gold dragons is that we have an appreciation for destruction. We know when it is necessary, and we understand when it isn’t. Gold dragons don’t respect what they can do, which is why they are such tyrants.”