Some time later.
I slept…
A long time.
At least, by the time I woke up, all the dragon little ones had already tired of playing with each other and had fallen asleep in my place.
But the number of adult dragons had only increased, and they had split into groups by interest.
Aside from me, the only hatchlings still awake were that red dragoness and one smaller white sibling of ours.
I headed toward them, involuntarily swaying my tail from side to side.
“Greetings,” I said, deciding not to unnerve my kin unnecessarily — I didn’t use telepathy, but continued practicing the dragon tongue.
“My name is Merinelteratsin, son of Vivinissalenis.” In the growling dragon-like language, our long names were much easier to pronounce than in any human or even elven tongue.
“Heard of you,” Keltullis snorted, involuntarily trying to look bigger by stretching her neck to its full length, but…
She still only reached halfway up my neck.
Still, I wasn’t too proud and lowered my head almost to the dragoness’s level.
“The Lazy Dragon.”
“Huh?” I growled in confusion.
“You’ve already been nicknamed the Lazy Dragon.
Because you slept all the time,” explained the white one, whose name hadn’t come up in the conversations of the now-sleeping little ones.
“That’s right,” the red dragoness grinned smugly, looking very dragon-like.
That is, like the most dangerous personality of our trio, the most battle-ready and…
Predatory.
I, on the other hand, leaned more toward looking like some wise and majestic companion, ye-e-es…
There was no other way to describe our appearances anyway — dragon muzzles were fundamentally different from human or even animal faces.
“You try flying all the way here from the Blue Mountains without a single stop,” I snorted in displeasure, shifting my front paws, not that I was offended, but hey!
I wanted a different nickname.
“Exactly!
I heard you settled in the old elven fortress?” the red dragoness immediately perked up, blazing with interest.
“We didn’t just settle there.
I hatched and grew up there,” I shrugged my front paws, since this gesture was quite possible for dragons and, consequently, quite common among them.
“So you’re no stranger to ruins,” the white one and the red one exchanged a suspicious glance, their tails twitching more intensely.
“I’m Vortigern, by the way…” the northerner finally introduced himself (his kind only lived in the north), arching his neck.
“And Keltullis and I want to invite you to fly to a place I recently discovered, on the westernmost edge of these mountains.”
“You?” I immediately questioned.
“Surely in the thousands of years our people have lived here, no one else found it before?” I stared skeptically at the white one, tilting my head slightly.
“Well, maybe someone did,” the white one replied, completely unembarrassed, stretching his whole body proudly.
“But I never heard my parents mention that place, so…
No one’s been there for the last few generations, for sure!
And if anyone had, they didn’t say anything…
Which makes it doubly interesting!
So, are you with us, or are you going to keep being lazy?”
“Oh…” …This socialization, I wanted to say, but I’d have to fly.
Otherwise, my nickname risked spreading among the dragons, and then to the mortals.
A Village, damn it, not a continent.
“Fine, it’s still closer than the Blue Mountains.”
“Excellent.
No calamity can catch three dragons!” Keltullis bared her teeth, stretching her neck.
“Sure, sure…” I grumbled with undisguised skepticism, but I didn’t refuse the adventure.
After all, it was unlikely that some kind of horror was living there, mysteriously surviving after millennia of dragon dominance.
And if it was so strong that even we couldn’t kill it, our parents would have warned us about it.
I figured it would be some abandoned elven or dwarven dwelling, local dwarves, and nothing interesting.
But…
I wasn’t such a moron as to not warn anyone, so…
“M-mom.
The white one and the red one are planning to fly to some ruins in the west of the mountains, and I’m going with them.
Just letting you know.” Telepathy came to the rescue as always.
“What kind of ruins?” the dragoness asked with the equivalent of a raised eyebrow, while continuing to converse with her kin and not giving away that she was using the same telepathy.
“I don’t know.
The white one found them, goes by Vortigern.
But I assume it’s an abandoned dwelling of the bipeds, like our lair…” It was my turn to use the telepathic equivalent of a shrug.
“Bipeds?
Fine, but don’t get yourselves into a mess with a large number of them.
Even the three of you are too early yet to fight a big swarm of ants,” Vivien waved a paw telepathically.
“If anything, ditch that pair and fly out of there with all your wings.
And notify me — you know how it’s done, I taught you.”
“Understood,” I replied briefly, breaking the telepathic link, which felt like a thin thread between our heads.
Jumping up and flapping our wings, our trio took to the air and followed the white one.
He desperately tried to fly faster, but we practically kept catching up to him and only consciously refrained from overtaking — after all, wing size, surprisingly, determined straight-line flight speed, and smaller size was only an advantage for maneuverability in the air and movement in general.
The mountains flew by one after another.
Flap, flap…
Flap.
The air beneath the clouds flowed around my entire body, letting me enjoy the flight once again.
“There it is!” Vortigern, whom I had caught up with again, exclaimed, pointing his right front paw somewhere below.
Glaring at him in displeasure for disrupting the feeling of flight, which had been almost meditative for me, I nevertheless shifted my gaze to the indicated point, turning my neck and head toward it.
“Hmm…
I don’t like this place,” I said immediately, feeling some vague…
No, it definitely wasn’t anxiety — my dragon instincts were silent on that front…
Otherwise I’d already be fleeing.
It was something…
Argh, I didn’t know how to describe it!
Like goosebumps running across my skin, only…
Without the skin itself and the physical presence of those goosebumps.
Given the fact that these fairly well-preserved ruins were covered in ice, the resemblance was even more fitting.
“And what are we going to explore here?” I asked when we descended.
“We can’t fit in there at all, not even you, Vortigern.”
For some reason, they glared at me in displeasure, and Keltullis answered instead of him.
“We’ll break it apart and take a look.
Melt it, break it apart, and take a look!” she bared her teeth in anticipation, and without letting me answer, she landed sharply on top of the ruins, exhaling a stream of flame directly in front of her.
It wasn’t powerful enough to destroy the stone with its force, but the ice began to slowly disappear.
Vortigern and I didn’t join in — he, because white dragons breathe freezing cold, not fire, and I, because I still felt goosebumps from this place.
Nevertheless, the flame of red dragons was the hottest of all, so the ruins were soon stripped of any trace of ice.
After that, the dragoness and the white one started actively smashing the roof of the ruins…
Vandals, pure vandals.
The structure itself didn’t resemble elven or dwarven ruins…
It was more like something the Nordlings, the northerners of the Continent, might have built…
…My thoughts were abruptly interrupted by a sudden sensation of someone else’s powerful magic.
Being able to absorb it from nature, dragons sensed it perfectly, detecting any bipedal sorcerers from a mile away.
At least, that’s what my mother the dragoness had told me.
No, no sudden and te-rr-ible monster crawled out at us in the end.
After all, dragons themselves were among those monsters.
No-o-o, something more terrible came to us.
Something far more frightening than any monster.
A human.
A human came to us.
First, we felt the cold.
The cold that made even the giant, fire-breathing reptiles shiver.
A bone-chilling blizzard swept around us, covering everything and forcing me to squint.
And only then did a small figure appear in its epicenter, its outlines hidden by the raging snow.
Vortigern and Keltullis saw it too.
The white dragon sharply turned his neck toward the uninvited guest, instantly exhaling a stream of freezing air.
An ordinary human would have suffered severe frostbite over their entire body and died on the spot.
But against the figure approaching us, it was useless — a translucent sphere appeared around it in an instant, and the stream of freezing air shattered against it powerlessly.
…And then, right through the dome, bright blue lightning flashed in the blizzard and struck Vortigern, running along his neck and body.
It almost immediately forced him to stop his freezing breath…
And he crashed from the roof of the broken ruins into the snow right next to me.
Fortunately, judging by his confused and rapid head-shaking, he was more alive than the living.
But Keltullis couldn’t stand such treatment of her friend and covered the indistinct figure with her own brightest fiery breath.
However, the translucent dome around the figure didn’t care about that attack either.
Needless to say, by this point I was seriously tense.
But when Keltullis was knocked off the roof in the same way, practically landing on Vortigern’s head, I…
Didn’t attack third.
On the contrary, I was ready to take off from my spot by the ruins and fly as high and far from the probable attack as possible.
Or even transform into a human, reducing my size and the target area for the enemy’s attack.
For that decision, I was rewarded with words instead of battle magic.
“So the wisdom of golden dragons is not exaggerated.
For once, the peasants’ rumors and the madmen’s research have proven true…
A pleasant change,” a voice rang out, no less cold than the surrounding air.
A woman’s voice.
The blizzard rapidly dissipated.
“You…
You…” I said slowly, leaning my whole body back.
At that moment, I instinctively wanted to be somewhere very, very far from the owner of such a voice…
Oh, it wouldn’t be shameful to admit it now.
Even as a full-grown dragon.
For the first time in both of my lives, I was so afraid.
A dragon was afraid of a fragile woman…
No, not that.
A sorceress.
A sorceress who, from under her veil, gazed at me with her blue eyes, in which there was only freezing ice.