The egg was still cracking when they moved him out.
Not away — they were not asking him to leave, Cassara clarified, and her tone was the clarifying tone she used when a distinction mattered and she wanted it understood without the softening that would make it seem like she was asking him to feel better about it. They were simply relocating the observation to an anteroom while the delegation viewing was completed.
"Viewing," Theron said.
"The delegations have been promised a viewing of the clutch. The promise was made three weeks ago, before we understood the resonance situation. The promise cannot be unmade." Cassara looked at the egg. "The viewing was scheduled for noon. It is currently the tenth hour."
"And the egg."
"The egg will do what the egg does on its own schedule." She said this with the confidence of someone who had spent thirty years watching living things ignore schedules entirely. "You'll be in the anteroom. Twenty feet away. If the resonance pattern changes significantly, I'll come for you myself."
She left him in the anteroom with a clay cup of water he didn't drink and a stone bench he sat on for approximately six minutes before he stood up and began pacing the length of the room, which was ten feet, and then pausing and pacing back, which was also ten feet, and this did not help but it organized the not-helping into a manageable rhythm.
The anteroom was warm. Heat from the mountain, diffuse and close, the kind that made you aware of your own skin. He'd been away from it for twenty-five months and he'd thought the awareness would be dulled — that the body forgets calibrations it doesn't use. But the body had not forgotten. If anything it had been waiting, the way a tuning fork held against something vibrating will begin to hum even if you aren't touching the strings. Everything in him that the Forge had opened was now open, and a specific thing below him was pulling at those openings like a tide at a window latch.
He paced.
He thought about Arvel.
Not the Crucible — he'd spent two years thinking about the Crucible, two years of turning it over and examining it from every angle, and Obsidius and then Cassara had given him the determinations that he'd needed to hear in the order that they'd been capable of hearing them, and what remained was not guilt exactly. More the shape of what had been in its absence. Arvel had been three years ahead of him, quick with theory, slow to admit uncertainty, with a laugh that arrived unexpectedly and often at his own expense when he forgot to guard against it. He'd been the kind of person who made the room he was in feel more specific. More itself.
Theron had been told the bond attempt wasn't his fault. He'd been told this now by enough people he respected that he'd moved from disbelieving it to something more complicated — a state that wasn't belief but wasn't denial either, more like a word in a language he didn't quite speak, recognizable without being usable.
What he thought about instead, now, was the bell.
The cracked bell that Cassara had described. What remained when a resonance was broken was not silence — it was a different sound. A changed sound. The bell still rang. It rang the note it had always rung, cracked through the middle, the overtones gone wrong, a sound that was unmistakably itself and also unmistakably not what it had been.
He thought: what would a Dragon want with a cracked bell?
He had been pacing for forty minutes when the door opened and Cassara said, "Come."
The clutch chamber, with twelve people in it, was different.
The delegations had arranged themselves in the way delegations arrange themselves — not randomly, each cluster maintaining its own geometry, each cluster's geometry communicating something to every other cluster. Compact soldiers at the chamber entrance, not inside, which was the tactical choice and also the courteous one. Luminary riders in pale leathers, the Crystalline Crest on their collars, standing in a loose group to the left. Registry assessors with their instruments, always with their instruments, three of them with different tools each pointing at the eggs, and Theron had a specific feeling about people who brought instruments to a hatching that he chose not to articulate. The Void Ascendant observers were against the far wall, separated by a deliberate margin from everyone else, and had the air of people attending a funeral for someone they had complicated feelings about.
And one person he didn't expect.
She was standing apart from the Luminary group, which told him she wasn't exactly with them, though she wore similar traveling clothes. She was perhaps two years younger than him, with the specific stillness of someone who had trained a long time in some kind of discipline that required it — stillness not as absence but as a directed thing, pointed inward. Her eyes were closed when he entered.
They opened when he entered.
They were silver.
He'd heard of that. Luminaries born with silver eyes were said to be Light-attuned in a way that ran deeper than training — the kind of attunement that the Registry argued was a mutation and the Luminary argued was a blessing and that both of them, Obsidius had once told him, were wrong about in complementary ways. Light-attuned, in the doctrine Theron had spent three years at the Forge studying, ran on the creation aspect of Fire — the spectrum of Fire that was concerned not with burning but with making visible, with form-giving, with the thin warm light that let other things be seen.
She had no business feeling a Dragon egg.
She was definitely feeling a Dragon egg. He could see it in the held quality of her stillness — something was running through her that she was managing, the way you manage a current when you're bracing against it.
Cassara brought him to the chamber's center without making it look like she was bringing him anywhere. A gift of her directorship — everything she did that looked like movement was actually positioning.
The eggs.
Three of them in the central depression, unchanged in their arrangement, though the light from the cracked one had intensified. Not dramatically. A gradual increase, the way a room gets lighter as you approach dawn, incrementally until the moment you realize you can see everything.
The crack was at least twice as wide as it had been when he came in this morning.
"It's moving faster," said one of the Registry assessors, looking at his instrument. His voice carried the professional neutrality of someone reporting data they understood to be significant. "The hatching rate has increased — approximately double the first three weeks' progress in the past two days."
"Since the arrival," said another assessor, looking at Theron.
"Correlation," the first said. "We can't confirm causation."
"We can note it."
Seraphine had not moved. She was positioned between the delegation clusters and the eggs — not aggressively, but definitively, in the way that extremely large things position themselves when they want something understood without saying it. Her amber eyes were moving through the room with the patient assessment of something that had watched the political calculations of mortal nations for long enough to find them legible.
Theron took his place at the chamber's edge. He was not part of the delegations. He was not part of the Forge staff. He was: present. That was the full extent of what he was.
The bell in his chest began to hum.
Not metaphor — he could feel it, a vibration in his sternum that he recognized as the resonance of his own fire-signature responding to something. He'd felt it in the morning, in the granary yard, when the formations passed overhead. He'd felt it in the deep Wastes looking west. He felt it now in a way that was close to unbearable, not painful but insistent, the way a bright light is insistent on the eyes even when you're looking away.
He breathed.
He looked at the crack in the egg and the light coming through it and he breathed.
The silver-eyed woman crossed the room.
She didn't do it in a way that announced itself — no sudden movement, just a gradual drift that looked like someone adjusting their position, and then she was beside him, and he was aware of her the way you're aware of something in your peripheral vision that is doing something unexpected.
"You're him," she said. Quietly. Not for the room.
"That depends on what 'him' means in this context."
"The one the egg is calling." She was looking at the cracked egg, not at him. "I can feel it. The pattern of it." A pause. "I'm not supposed to be able to feel it."
"You're Luminary."
"Yes."
"Light-attuned."
"Very much yes." Her voice had a quality he couldn't immediately classify — it wasn't bitterness or irony, it was something more specific, the tone of someone reporting a fact that has been inconvenient in documented and particular ways. "Fire-resonance and Light-resonance are distinct. Overlapping family, entirely separate channels. I should be able to sense the eggs the way I sense any heat source — ambient, undifferentiated. I should not be able to feel the eggs individually." Another pause. "I can feel all three of them individually."
He looked at her.
She had her hands folded in front of her with the precision of someone who knew what her hands did when they weren't being monitored and was monitoring them. She was perhaps twenty. She had the posture of someone who'd been told since childhood that posture communicated virtue and had eventually come to believe it, not as performance but as habit.
"Serai," she said.
"Theron."
"I know." She glanced at him, then back at the eggs. "Your file is interesting."
"I don't have a file with the Luminary."
"Everyone has a file." She said this matter-of-factly, the way you say things that are true and obvious. "Yours is three volumes. The third one is mostly blank, which is usually the most interesting kind."
He did not ask what was in the other two.
"What does it feel like?" he said instead. "Feeling the eggs."
She was quiet for a moment. "One of them is cold," she said. "The one on the left, if you're standing where we're standing. Cold isn't right — colder. Like the far end of light, the ultraviolet part that doesn't warm. The second one is—" She stopped. Considered. "Deep. Low. The kind of resonance that has no color attached to it. Like a note below the range of sound." Another pause. "And the third. The one that's cracking." She pressed her lips together. "That one is everything."
He looked at the egg. The light from the crack had widened another degree while they were talking.
"You felt something earlier," she said. "When you came in. I watched you feel it."
"The bell."
"The what?"
"Something Cassara said. About resonance that's been—changed. Altered." He looked at his hand. He hadn't summoned flame — this was not the place for casual summoning, not with delegations watching, not with Seraphine in the room with her steady amber assessment. But he could feel the warmth at his palm anyway, the fire that was always there below the surface, the one that had been cracked by the Crucible and had been ringing differently since. "She said the egg was calling a cracked bell. She meant me. She meant my resonance is different from what it was and the egg matches to the different version."
Serai said nothing for a moment. Then: "Light doesn't break that way. When Light-attunement is disrupted, it — disperses. It goes diffuse. It doesn't crack and ring with a different quality." She was looking at her own hands now. "Which is why I shouldn't be able to do what I'm doing right now."
"What are you doing right now?"
She unfolded her hands and held one out, palm up. He looked at it. He couldn't see anything. Then she tilted her hand slightly, and at that angle he could see — barely, a shimmer, the kind of light-effect that you'd normally attribute to heat distortion or the refraction of tears if you had been crying, which she hadn't been. Something hovered above her palm that was not quite light and not quite warmth and was very precisely located, as opposed to ambient, as opposed to diffuse.
"I've been doing this for three weeks," she said. "Since the eggs started resonating. Since the pattern started. I can make light," she said, with the flatness of someone correcting themselves, "any Luminary can make light. But this is — held." She looked at it. "This stays in one place without effort. Light doesn't do that. Light disperses. That's what light does."
He watched the thing above her palm. It was perfectly still.
"You're feeling the Fire element through the Light channel," he said slowly. "Not ambient. Not scattered. The creation aspect of Fire that Light is descended from." He tried to put words around what he meant. "Before Fire learned to burn, it was — presence. The quality of something being exactly where it is. Unmoved." He looked at the egg. "A Dragon hatchling holds exactly that quality. Before it learns to breathe, before it learns to fly, before it learns anything — it is exactly and specifically itself. And that is Fire's deepest aspect and also, by descent, the root that Light came from."
Serai looked at the thing above her palm.
"I've had this explained to me," she said, "in several academic frameworks, by three different Luminary scholars, and I understood all of their explanations and none of them felt like this." She closed her hand. The thing disappeared. "Why can I feel the eggs and none of the Luminary scholars can?"
He didn't have an answer. He had the beginning of an answer and he didn't want to say the beginning without the rest because beginnings without their rest were how the worst kinds of hope got started.
The egg cracked.
Not the equatorial seam. The whole egg.
He heard it — a sound like the settling of something that had held its shape for a long time and was now, slowly, no longer required to. Not explosive. Not dramatic. A sound with patience in it. The crack ran from the equatorial seam up along the long axis, forking near the top, and the light from inside went from the point-source it had been to something diffuse and everywhere and very, very wrong.
He said wrong. He corrected himself immediately. Not wrong. Different. The light from a Fire Dragon egg is warm orange-red, the interior heat of a deep fire, specific and localized. The light coming from this egg was white at the source and then, at the edges of the white, something he didn't have a color word for. The Registry assessors were making sounds at their instruments. The Compact soldiers in the doorway shifted.
Seraphine rose.
She did not stand the way large animals stand, from one position to another. She rose the way a very old mountain rises — a reconfiguration, an imposing of presence, a declaration that the space had changed its primary occupant. Her amber eyes were on the egg.
The shell fell.
In pieces. Slowly. Each piece separated from the others with the deliberateness of something that had been waiting and was now choosing to be done waiting. The light, freed from the shell, expanded — filling the depression, running along the floor, reaching the walls.
In the light: the hatchling.
It was the size — he'd known to expect this, the hatchling would be large by the standards of anything born, a Dragon was not a small creature even at birth — it was the size of a large dog, coiled, wet from the shell, its head down and its sides moving in the first slow breathing of a creature that had just learned it needed to breathe. He waited for the scales to clarify. Fire Dragons ran amber-gold, deep red, orange at the edges. Seraphine's coloring at the dark amber end of the spectrum.
The scales were not amber. They were not red.
They were, as they dried and the light hit them: white at the spine, deepening to the blue-black of deep water at the belly, and at the wingfolds — still compressed, still wet, not yet extended — something he could only describe as the color of the space between stars. Not black. The specific color of a void that has stars all around it and is, itself, the absence they frame.
The Registry assessors had stopped speaking.
The Luminary riders had gone very still.
Even the Compact soldiers in the doorway had done the thing soldiers do when their training runs into something it didn't account for — they had not moved, which was correct, but they had also stopped breathing, which was not.
The hatchling raised its head.
He had expected eyes the color of its lineage — Dragon eyes ran with the element, the amber of fire, the gold of old flames. The hatchling's eyes were silver-white, like starlight refracted, and they moved with the deliberate focus of something that was already taking inventory of the world and finding it comprehensible.
It looked at the delegations.
One by one. Not scanning — considering. The Luminary riders. The Registry assessors with their instruments. The Compact soldiers in the doorway. The Void Ascendant observers against the far wall. It held each group for two or three seconds, with the specific quality of attention that said: I see you. I have filed you. I have not determined what to do with you yet.
Then it looked at Seraphine.
Seraphine looked back, and her expression — if the expression of a Dragon the size of a house, possessed of two thousand years and a manner that had stopped giving ground to lesser concerns sometime in the previous millennium — could be called an expression, what she had on her face at this moment was something Theron had seen once before in his life, on the face of a woman in the Forge's entry hall who had just heard news she'd spent six years preparing herself to receive. A thing both expected and not. A thing that was everything you'd thought and nothing like you'd thought.
The hatchling looked at the other two eggs.
It lowered its head. Not in obeisance — it didn't have that in it, Theron thought, it was going to be the kind of creature that understood submission only as a tactic and deference only as a courtesy. It lowered its head the way you bow to someone who is not above you but whom you have decided to honor.
It curled its body slowly around the base of the two remaining eggs.
Not touching them. Close. The way you hold a space around something you're keeping.
"It's waiting," Serai said, very quietly.
"Yes," Theron said.
"For the other two."
"Yes."
"It hatched first and it's—" She paused. "It chose not to bond. Right now. It's choosing not to bond yet because—" She stopped again.
"Because it's the first," Theron said, and heard in his own voice something he hadn't intended to put there. "And it's not going to be the only. And it knows that. It's known that since before the shell broke."
The hatchling breathed slowly, its white-and-void scales settling. Its silver-white eyes were on the two remaining eggs. Patient. Ready. Already deciding, he thought, how this was going to go. Already working out, in whatever way a hatchling that was five minutes old worked things out, the terms under which it was going to meet the world.
The Registry assessors were quiet. The Compact soldiers had not re-learned how to breathe. The Luminary riders were looking at each other with expressions that said we are going to need to revise several things.
Seraphine's amber gaze moved from the hatchling to the two remaining eggs to the room.
And then to Theron.
He met it. He had learned — in his time at the Forge, in the three years before the Crucible, in the eleven months Obsidius had spent being patient at him in fields and then in doorways and then at distance while he packed a bag and rode west — he had learned that Seraphine did not look at you for nothing. She was not a creature who collected ambient impressions. She looked at you specifically and with purpose, and the purpose was a question she was answering for herself before she answered it for anyone else.
He let her look.
She crossed to him.
The room's geometry changed — people moved without deciding to move, the way water moves around something introduced into it, creating new channels without being asked. Seraphine moved through the chamber with the deliberateness of geological formations on the march and the delegations accommodated her and there was something in the accommodating that was not fear and was not reverence but was very specifically the acknowledgment of something larger than the political frameworks everyone had come here carrying.
She stopped in front of him.
She was very close. Large enough that her presence had its own weather — the heat of her, directional and specific, the particular sulphur-and-deep-stone smell that the mountain shared. Her eyes were amber and steady and at this range they were the color of fire seen through old glass, complex and layered.
"You came back," she said.
"Yes."
"I wasn't certain you would."
"I wasn't certain either."
A long pause. In it, the sound of the hatchling's breathing — slow, deliberate, already establishing the rhythm it intended to maintain. "Twenty-five months ago," she said, "when the Crucible — when Arvel — I was in the upper Roosts. I heard it. I heard the bond attempt and the dissolution and what happened between." Her head tilted slightly, moving one amber eye more directly level with him. "And I could have come down."
He hadn't known that.
"I could have intervened. In the dissolution. A Dragon's presence in a partial-bond crisis introduces stabilizing resonance — the documentation on this exists, though it's not widely circulated." Another pause. "I chose not to."
He worked to keep his face from doing anything.
"Because the bond attempt should not have been unsupervised," she said. "Because what happened to both of you was a Forge failure, not a student failure, and the Forge needed to understand that it could not be absorbed into an institutional outcome. Because—" She stopped. Started again. "Because I have been present for enough partial-bond deaths in two thousand years that I understand how they happen and what they cost and I still chose not to intervene, and that is something I hold."
The room was completely silent.
"I don't—" he started.
"I'm not asking for absolution," she said. "I'm telling you what happened so that you know the full accounting as I know it. What I chose and what it cost. Because you're going to be in this building for the foreseeable future and I prefer clarity to the versions people construct when they don't have the direct one."
He was quiet.
"The hatchling," she said, finally. "Its coloring. What do you make of it?"
He looked at the hatchling, curled around the two remaining eggs, its white-and-void scales settled now, its breathing regular. "It's multiple elements," he said. "White at the spine is Fire — but the deep form of it, the creation aspect, before Fire differentiated into warmth and light. The blue-black at the belly is—Water? No. Deeper than Water. Void, maybe. Nero's aspect." He looked at the wingfolds. "And whatever the wingfolds are, that's something I don't have a reference for. Something primordial."
"Yes," Seraphine said.
"A Dragon like this shouldn't exist."
"Shouldn't is a word that describes the past," she said. "What has existed, what has been possible within the parameters previously established. Dragons are the children of Draconia and Draconis, and Draconia is Fire's domain — yes. But Fire is connected at the root to every element. Fire before it was Fire was the first warmth, and the first warmth predates the differentiation that produced the separate elements we name." She looked at the hatchling. "Embera is the first Dragon born in two centuries. She was formed by a world that has spent two centuries integrating experiences the Dragon lineage has never had. She may have reached back for something older than the Fire classification." A pause. "The hatchling is not an anomaly. It is an answer."
"To what question?"
Seraphine was quiet for a long moment.
"The question of whether the lineage can hold what the world is becoming."
The voice from the doorway.
He had forgotten, in the intensity of the past twenty minutes, that someone else was supposed to arrive. Obsidius had told him, in the field in the Wastes with the fence board in his hands, that the Forge was expecting additional interest. He'd pictured more delegations. More assessors. More political geometry.
He had not pictured a Dragon.
Obsidius filled the entrance to the chamber the way large things fill entrances — completely, with no remainder, the space he occupied simply becoming him. His dark-scaled head lowered through the doorway with the care of something very aware of its own scale relative to built structures, and then he was inside, or partly inside, in the way that very large things are partly inside rooms that are technically adequate for them.
His amber eyes moved through the chamber. The delegations. Seraphine. The hatchling. The two remaining eggs.
They stopped on the hatchling.
Theron had seen Obsidius process things before. He had a distinctive relationship with language — used it with precision, sat with questions for long enough that you sometimes thought he'd stopped listening and then discovered he'd been listening in a way that preceded words entirely. He had never seen Obsidius go quiet in the way he was quiet now.
It wasn't the quiet of thinking. It was the quiet of something very old encountering something it had not imagined.
Obsidius had been alive for two thousand years. He had been present for the previous Dragon hatching. He had watched empires form and dissolve, had witnessed the Forge's founding and its periodic crisis and its reconstruction. He had strong views about everything and held them with the patience of geological time.
He looked at the hatchling and said nothing.
Seraphine looked at him.
"Obsidius," she said. The way you say the name of someone you've known for two thousand years and are checking whether they're still in the room.
He was still in the room. He was very much in the room. He was, Theron thought, the most present he'd ever been in a room, in the specific sense of a presence that has encountered something that has relocated the full weight of it into this specific moment.
The hatchling, curled around the two remaining eggs, lifted its head.
It looked at Obsidius.
The look lasted approximately four seconds.
Then it lowered its head again and returned its attention to the eggs.
The room waited.
Obsidius drew a breath that was, for a Dragon, equivalent to a human drawing the breath before a long speech.
He said nothing.
He looked at Theron.
"You came back," he said, finally, which was the same thing Seraphine had said, but in his voice it sounded like a different kind of reckoning.
"You spent two months watching me fix things in that field," Theron said. "You knew I'd come back."
"I knew you were capable of coming back," Obsidius said. "Those are not the same thing and I have been alive long enough to know it." He looked at the hatchling. Then back at Theron. "I have no words for what that is."
"I know," Theron said.
"I don't say this often."
"I know."
"It's not—" Obsidius stopped. Started again. The visible effort of this, in a creature for whom language was usually so available, was itself a kind of information. "There is nothing in two thousand years of what I understand the Dragon lineage to mean that gives me a framework for what that hatchling is. Its resonance pattern is outside—" He stopped again. "I can feel it from here. It's all of it. Not combined. Not a blend. The root before the branching."
"Primordial," Seraphine said.
"Yes." He looked at her. "How?"
"Embera reached for something old," she said. "I don't know the mechanism. I know the result."
"The result is standing in front of me and I have nothing."
"You have two thousand years of what it used to mean," she said. "You'll need to expand what it means."
Obsidius was quiet again.
The hatchling breathed, slow and steady, its white-and-void scales rising and falling with the rhythm of something that had arrived with a complete understanding of its own necessity and intended to hold that understanding patient and intact until the world was ready to receive it.
Theron looked at the cracked bell in his chest and the hatchling looking at two remaining eggs and Obsidius having no words and Seraphine having the words but holding them until they were needed.
He thought: this is not what any of us thought we were going to.
He thought: it never is.
He thought about the weight he'd been holding for twenty-five months in the granary and the fence line and the bad wine, the weight he'd been calling grief and that had been grief, certainly, but underneath the grief something else — a resonance pattern for which there was still, somewhere, a corresponding note.
The cracked bell rings differently.
It still rings.
Serai was beside him again.
He hadn't seen her cross the room. She moved the way her stillness moved — quietly, as if arriving rather than traveling.
"It didn't bond," she said.
"No."
"But it looked at you."
He had been aware of this. The hatchling's silver-white eyes on him, for approximately the same four seconds they'd been on Obsidius. A calibration. A taking of measure. Nothing that committed either of them to anything.
"It looked at everyone," he said.
"Not the same way." She was watching the hatchling, her silver eyes tracking its slow breathing. "When it looked at the Compact soldiers it looked at threat-assessment. When it looked at the assessors it looked at—" She paused, finding the word. "Inventory. When it looked at the Void Ascendants it looked at them with something I don't have a word for. Not hostility. Like reading a language you don't speak in a tongue you recognize." She paused again. "When it looked at you it looked the way—" She stopped for longer this time.
"Go ahead," he said.
"The way I look at something when I'm confirming that what I already knew is true," she said. "Not discovering. Confirming."
He looked at the egg it was curled around. The two that remained. Both still whole, both still radiating their distinctive resonances — the cold ultraviolet one on the left, the low deep one on the right.
"You can feel the other two," he said.
"Yes."
"Distinctly."
"Yes."
He looked at her. She was very still, her hands folded again, her silver eyes steady on the eggs. He thought: three eggs. Three hatchlings, when all of them come. And a hatchling that chose to wait.
Three distinct resonances.
"Is there anyone else," he said, carefully, "who can feel the other two eggs the way I can feel this one and you can feel—whatever you can feel?"
She looked at him. "What do you mean."
"I mean the cold one on the left. The deep one on the right. Is there someone in this room who shouldn't be able to feel either of those and can feel them anyway."
Her silver eyes moved through the room. He watched her look. He watched her stop.
Against the far wall, separated from the other delegations, the Void Ascendant observers.
One of them was young. Younger than the others — early twenties, dressed in the observational black the Ascendants wore, which was a political affectation more than a meaningful distinction but which the Ascendants maintained with the rigor of people for whom affectations had stopped being affectations and become identity. Young, and standing with the specific stillness of someone managing something that was asking to be felt and they were declining to feel in this room, in this company, in these political circumstances.
He was looking at the cold egg on the left.
Not cataloguing. Not assessing.
Listening.
Theron looked at Serai.
Serai looked at Theron.
"This is going to be more complicated than the delegations planned for," she said.
"Yes," he said.
He looked at the hatchling, patient at the center of what it had decided to wait for, its primordial scales steady in the light of the chamber, its silver-white eyes closed now, its breathing the slow certainty of something that had already decided everything it needed to decide about this room and was resting between chapters.
He thought: three eggs.
He thought: three people who shouldn't feel a Dragon and can.
He thought: the Forge is going to need a different kind of documentation for this.
The bell in his chest struck its cracked note, clear and fractured, unmistakably itself. Below in the depression, the two remaining eggs held their light and their cold and their depth, patient as their sibling, patient as the old Dragon who had run out of words, patient as the mountain itself, which had been here since before the concept of waiting applied to anything in Arcanea and would be here considerably after.
Theron had nowhere he needed to be except here.
For the first time in twenty-six months, that felt like enough.
End of Chapter Two
Select a sentence in the chapter to make a personal visual interpretation.