Three months passed.
Varta didn't stop for them. It never did. The snow in the Frost Kingdom fell the way it always fell — without consulting anyone about whether this was a good time. The Great Forest grew back slowly where it could and didn't where it couldn't, the burned sections standing as open sky where the canopy used to be, Drune walking the edges of them in the mornings and not saying much about what he saw.
The dwarf children had stopped flinching at sudden sounds. That was how Syphon measured their progress — not by what they said or how they smiled but by what their bodies stopped doing without being asked. Three months ago, a door closing too fast sent all five of them flat against the nearest wall. Now they ran through corridors and argued over meals, and one of them had developed an aggressive interest in elven archery that the instructors found equal parts exhausting and impressive.
They were going to be alright. Not unchanged. But alright.
In Vartas, the children from the dungeon had mostly gone home. The ones with homes to go to. The ones without had stayed in the capital, absorbed into households that had space and into a city that had collectively decided these particular children were everyone's responsibility. A few of them still woke in the night. A few still sat with their backs to the wall when given the choice. But they ate. They laughed sometimes. They were learning, slowly, that the dark had been a place they'd been and not a place they were.
Julius watched it happening from a careful distance, and felt something he rarely let himself feel — something close to relief, if relief was allowed to coexist with everything else he was carrying simultaneously.
Historia's belly had grown. Noticeably now, visibly, the pregnancy past the point of being something only the two of them knew about. She moved through the palace with patience, and she did it with a grace that Julius found quietly extraordinary every time he watched it.
He sat beside her in the afternoons when the council sessions ended, and the correspondence was answered, and there was a window between obligations. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they didn't. Both were fine.
High in the palace, Asterdolf stood at his window.
He did this most mornings — stood at the window above the capital and looked at what it had become. The market below operating without knowledge of what had nearly reached it. The construction crews on the eastern roads moving materials toward the dragon's castle site. The magic knights cycling through their patrols.
He smiled at it. Not a large smile. Just the expression of a man who had carried a kingdom for decades and found it still standing on mornings when he checked.
He looked at the sky above the capital for a long moment. Then he turned from the window and went back to his chair.
In the remote lands due east of the empire, the dragon's castle was almost finished.
Almost. The towers were up. The walls were up. The main hall existed now as something you could stand inside rather than something drawn on a planning document. What remained was detail work — finishing the upper chambers, laying the courtyard stone, completing the gate structure that Julius's architects had revised three times, trying to make it worthy of the being who had demanded the thing be built.
The workers moved through the site with the particular energy of people who could see the end of something and were running toward it. Carrying, lifting, arguing about load weights and stone placement, and whether the eastern parapet was level — the ordinary noise of construction that had been ongoing for almost two years and was finally approaching its conclusion.
From the valley below the site, a red hill watched them.
A very large red hill. With scales. And spikes along the ridge that caught the morning light at different angles.
Indura lay in the valley with his chin on the earth and his golden eyes tracking the movement on the construction site with the focused attention of something that had decided this was the most interesting thing available and was going to look at it until something more interesting appeared.
If I fly over there, they'll run, he thought. Every time. I fly within a certain distance, and the ones who see me first start shouting, and then the ones who don't see me start running because the ones who see me are shouting, and then everyone is running, and nothing gets built.
He had tested this theory four times in the past month. The results were consistent.
His stomach growled loudly, a sound that traveled further than stomach sounds had any right to travel. Several workers on the site paused briefly, looked around, and then went back to work without identifying the source.
Weeks, he thought. I haven't eaten properly in weeks.
He thought about a whale. He'd caught it off the eastern coast on a dive he hadn't planned — just spotted it below the surface and made a decision. It had been enormous by whale standards. Insufficient by his standards. He'd eaten it in four minutes and felt the same afterward as before.
He thought about the primal region. The tribes that lived in the deep interior, away from the kingdoms, away from anything with a recognizable name. He'd spent three weeks there after the whale incident, moving quietly through their territory at night and helping himself to their preserved meat stores. They'd attributed it to spirits. He'd eaten seventeen days of preserved provisions in one sitting and felt approximately forty percent satisfied.
He'd gotten bored eventually and left. He always got bored eventually.
Syphon's words, something said from somewhere in the back of his mind, and he shook his head — a motion that sent a small tremor through the valley floor and made two workers on the site grab their scaffolding and looked around again.
He didn't want to think about Syphon's words. The guilt that had arrived in that chamber and decided to stay was an unwelcome resident; he was not interested in giving it more space than it had already taken.
He stood — slowly, controlling each footfall with the concentration of someone parallel parking something the size of a small mountain — and turned away from the construction site. A few workers noticed the movement. A few pointed. Nobody ran this time, which he counted as progress.
He launched into the sky.
The clouds at altitude were cold and thin, and he went through them upside down for a while because the view was different that way and was currently preferable to everything familiar.
He thought about Gundr. The battle above the atmosphere. The specific moment he'd decided to release all his mana and found out that releasing all your mana when a divine guardian is trying to kill you was both an excellent and a terrible idea.
I almost died, he thought. Almost.
He tilted and faced forward.
The sunrise was doing something worth acknowledging — the light coming across the clouds at an angle that turned everything it touched gold and orange and a specific shade of red that he appreciated without needing to say why. The wind at this altitude had a freshness it couldn't match at lower altitudes. Clean. Cold. Moving through his scales without resistance.
A good morning as always, he thought at nothing in particular.
He looked down.
There — below, between the geography and the memory of geography — the shape of his old mountain. What was left of it. The crater and rubble were visible even from this height, the specific wound of a place that had been altered against its nature.
He tucked his wings and dove down, cutting through the winds at his descent.
He landed in the rubble, and the red energy came off him as the transformation settled — the dragon form pulling inward, the humanoid assembling around what remained, the royal clothing becoming visible with his appearance, black and red clothing, with a cloak attached.
He stood in the center of what had been his mountain.
Three hundred years. He had lived here for three hundred years. He knew every stone that had been here, every cave system that had run through the interior, every ledge that caught the afternoon light at the right angle, and every draft that came through the lower passages in winter. He'd stored things here. Organized them the way creatures that lived alone for centuries organized.
All of it rubble now.
He crouched and put his hand against the ground where one of the lower caves used to open. The stone was cold. Just stone.
"Home," he said quietly. To the ground. Not expecting an answer.
He heard it then — footsteps. Below him, on what remained of the mountain's lower slope. He straightened and looked.
An old man was climbing.
White hair. A walking stick that he was using with the confidence of someone who had been using walking sticks long enough. Behind him, attached to a lead, a donkey that appeared to share the old man's opinion about the pace of the ascent — moving steadily.
The old man looked up and saw Indura and stopped.
"What are you doing up here?" he said. His voice had the texture of someone who had been talking to people for a very long time and had stopped being surprised by most of what they said or did.
Indura looked at him. Then at the donkey. Then back.
"I could ask you the same thing," he said. "With a donkey."
"This is dangerous ground, young man. The dragon lived here. It could come back any time."
Indura smiled slowly. "It would eat you."
"Don't joke with the elderly."
"I'm not joking with you. I'm informing you."
The old man looked at him for a moment, deciding whether this qualified as rudeness or just youth. He apparently decided it was youth and started climbing again.
"What are you doing all the way up here, old man?" Indura asked. "At your age, you should be in bed waiting for death."
The old man stopped climbing and laughed — a genuine laugh, the kind that came from somewhere real rather than from politeness. "I've never heard it put that way before." He kept climbing. "I'm here for berries. Good ones grow on this mountain. They always have. The destruction of this mountain didn't stop them." He reached the level where Indura was standing and looked around at the rubble with calm.
"They're purple ones, the size of coconuts. Juice like you wouldn't believe."
Indura's attention sharpened noticeably. "What kind of berries?"
The old man looked at him sideways. One eye narrowed with the specific expression of someone who knew they had information that was wanted. "The kind," he said carefully, "that would make a dragon go mad for them."
Indura cleared his throat. Straightened slightly. "Ahem...w-where are they?"
"Little secret."
"Tell me."
"Little. Secret."
Indura looked at him. The old man looked back with complete serenity.
"Fine," Indura said. "Show me."
The cave was low on the mountain's interior side, tucked behind a section of collapsed stone that the destruction had rearranged into something that was almost a shelter. The berries grew along the cave wall in clusters — purple, enormous, catching the thin light coming through the cave entrance in a way that made them look like they were lit from inside.
Indura ate four before the old man had finished settling himself against the cave wall.
"Slow down," the old man said. "There are more all over this world."
Indura raised one hand in the universal gesture of give me a moment and ate another one, the juice running down his chin, his expression achieving a quality of satisfaction that six hundred years of existence had produced very rarely.
He exhaled.
"You have a good eye, old man," he said.
The old man laughed. "Always have." He looked around the cave casually. "It's just so sad about what happened to this mountain. I was grazing my donkey on my farmland when it happened one evening. It was a good evening too, until—" He spread his arms wide, the walking stick horizontal. "Light, from above, came straight down, and 'BOOM'. Gone."
Indura paused mid-reach for another berry. "What light?"
"It was a huge thing. Like the sky opened and decided to close again on something specific." The old man settled more comfortably. "It took a part of the mountain. Gone in seconds."
"The humans destroyed it," Indura said. "The war that took place some time ago caused it."
The old man shook his head slowly. "The war was happening miles from here. Neither kingdom knew this mountain existed." He looked at Indura. "A mountain twenty thousand feet high, with a dragon five thousand feet tall sleeping inside it. You'd have to travel for days just to reach it. And they were too busy killing each other to travel." He paused. "No. Whatever hit this mountain came from somewhere else."
Indura looked at him.
"How do you know all this?"
The old man shrugged. "I'm old. Old men pay attention to things. Nobody thinks we're listening, so we hear everything." He picked up a berry and bit into it. The juice escaped dramatically. He exhaled with satisfaction. "Besides. Light that destroys a mountain doesn't come from humans. Humans can barely light a torch in the wind."
Indura ate another berry. Slowly this time. Thinking.
"Then where did it come from?"
The old man chewed. Looked at the cave ceiling. Made the expression of someone working through a difficult question they weren't sure they should answer. Then, as if the thought arrived casually rather than having been sitting ready:
"Hhmm...maybe... the Sky Palace."
Indura turned to look at him.
The old man was looking at the cave wall. Eating his berry. Not looking back.
"How do you know about the Sky Palace?" Indura asked.
"Old stories. Everyone where I'm from grew up on them. White warriors. Divine order. Descended three thousand years ago, saved the world, been deciding what to do with it ever since." He waved the berry vaguely. "Stories."
"Why would the Sky Palace destroy a dragon's mountain?"
The old man looked at him now. Directly. "Don't ask me to know everything. I'm just an old man who grew up on old stories." He looked away again. "But. If I had to think about it." He paused. Seemed to think about it. "Maybe they were testing it. Maybe the dragon had been quiet too long. Maybe they hunt things that grow too strong without their permission." Another pause. "The divine order doesn't like things it didn't create. Everyone knows that from the old stories."
Indura sat with that.
"The dwarves," the old man said. "Unfortunate business. I heard about it from travelers."
Indura laughed quietly. Looked sideways.
"If the Sky Palace had known," the old man continued, "they'd have been here immediately. But they weren't, were they? Which means something is wrong with them. Something they're not showing." He bit into another berry. "Or they showed up late. Which means they're watching now. Looking for what it did."
Indura pressed him. "How much do you actually know?"
"Old stories," the old man said simply. "Just old stories." He looked at Indura with the casual expression of someone sharing a thought they'd just had. "The Sky Palace does whatever it wants. This world is nothing to them. A dragon is interesting to them — something powerful they didn't make, didn't authorize, didn't control." He tilted his head. "They tame things like that. The strong ones become their hunting animals. The ones that resist—" He made a gesture with the berry that implied an unpleasant conclusion.
Indura stopped chewing.
The old man continued. "The only way a dragon survives something like that is to go up and meet them before they come down." He paused. "If it can."
"You think the dragon could?"
"I think the divine order is formidable, but they are not the only ones in this universe, and they have a palace," the old man said. "Palaces are big. A dragon that owned a palace like that—" He made a different gesture. An appreciative one.
Indura looked at him for a long moment.
Then he laughed. Loud. The cave amplifying it, the sound rolling back at both of them. "You're something else, old man."
The old man raised his shoulders. "Just old stories."
"The empire is building the dragon a castle," Indura said. "I heard from someone."
"I heard that too." The old man looked at him. "The Sky Palace would destroy that first, probably. Before they came for the dragon. They would remove its comfort, remove its anchor." He ate the last of his berry. "That's what the old stories say they do."
Indura went very still.
The castle.
The old man stood slowly, using the walking stick, and brushed berry debris from his clothing with the unhurried movements of someone who had nowhere to be and had made peace with that. "We should go. It's almost noon."
They walked out of the cave. The afternoon light was coming across the rubble at an angle that made the broken stone look almost deliberate — like something arranged rather than destroyed.
At the bottom of the slope, they separated. The old man took up his donkey's lead and nodded at Indura.
"Thank you for the company, young man."
"Thank you for the berries," Indura said. He paused. "You're strange for someone your age."
"You're strange for someone of any age," the old man said pleasantly, and walked away down the path that led toward the farmlands, the donkey following with its characteristic lack of enthusiasm.
Indura watched him go.
Strange old man.
But the thought that followed was different. It moved through him with a momentum that the berry eating and the pleasant conversation had disguised until now — arriving fully formed, built from pieces that had been placed one at a time without him noticing.
He looked at the mountain. At the size of what remained. At the scale of the destruction.
Now that I think of it, the humans couldn't have done this. It's just way too large to be destroyed by human logic. They didn't even know it was here.
He looked up. At the sky above the mountain. At the specific direction the light would have come from if it had come from above.
He thought about Gundr — the divine warrior who had descended, who was shocked to see him, who had mentioned Chaos and his kind living there. Who had nearly killed him.
He smiled.
Then he laughed — loud, sudden, the sound going up from the mountain's rubble into the evening sky above it. He laughed until it ran out, and then he stood in the quiet that followed and looked up and made a decision.
He leaped high above into the sky, transforming back into his true form, and heading back towards the empire.
Below, on the road that led away from the mountain, the old man stopped walking. He looked up at the sky where Indura had been a moment ago and was no longer. The red shape climbing fast, breaking through the lower clouds.
"Not bad for a performance," he said to himself
The donkey looked at him.
"When will the dragon learn the real truth?" the donkey asked
The old man started walking again. "When it's ready. When it's more than it is now. Hungrier for it." He looked at the road ahead. "Just not yet."
The donkey sighed. "I hope it doesn't do anything rash when it finds out."
"It will absolutely do something rash," the old man said. "That's rather the point. Sure I mixed in a few truths and a few lies, but that is all perfect for its new purpose. Now all it has to do is wreak some havoc on that corrupted sky palace. Besides, three sky warriors are already here...hehe...they don't know what's coming."
They walked on into the afternoon. Behind them, the mountain stood in its broken state against the bright sky, the berries growing quietly in the cave on its interior side, patient and purple and waiting for whoever came looking next.