Winter, 2064 CE, 20 miles beneath English Channel

  DAURIA BREATHED A deep, watery sigh as she released a stream of power from her Apex. It had no visible effect on the wall of the cavern.

  She was running out of ideas.

  Graayyya, floating in the dark water beside her, seemed only mildly perturbed. What else can we do? she asked.

  With a slight shake of her head, Dauria swam down to the lower depths of the cavern. Drawing a sliver of power from her Apex, she shone a light on the rock walls and floor. Let’s look around in here, she said. There may be an imperfection or damage somewhere in the walls of your lair that we could use to escape.

  Is that likely? Graayyya sounded dubious.

  Dauria scoffed aloud, though the sound was obliterated by the water around her. No, it isn’t. But we’ve already exhausted all the likely options and we now have to resort to the unlikely, the improbable, and perhaps even the absurd.

  Though she seemed far from convinced, Graayyya nodded her assent and moved off toward Dauria’s left, shining a light on the bottom of the cavern.

  Although she herself thought this line of effort a waste of time, Dauria continued, paying as much attention as she could muster toward looking for anything in the rock that she could use.

  The rock floor of the cavern was perfectly smooth, as had been the intention when they had carved out the cave. Centuries of water current flowing through had polished the rock to a low gloss that reflected a portion of the light shone upon it. Across the floor she moved, looking for any sign of crack or ding. Anything that might indicate there had been damage to the rock that she could exploit.

  After what seemed like hours, she met Graayyya on the far side of the cavern, neither having found even the slightest blemish.

  Do you think it might be possible to break through the wall? Graayyya asked. Not at the exit, but up or down from there?

  Dauria shook her head. It wasn’t a bad thought, just one that emphasized her friend’s lack of memory of creating this place. When we built this lair, we took special pains to ensure the whole of it was reinforced to be extra strong. We didn’t want to take any chance of an underwater quake or volcanic eruption destroying your sleeping space.

  Graayyya nodded, though she narrowed her eyes. Clearly a thought had occurred to her.

  To say nothing of the possibility that humans might one day develop technology to allow them to explore the depths. The last thing any of us wanted was for our lairs to be found by them. Especially then, when dragon slayers were becoming so prevalent in so many cultures.

  Again, the garnet nodded. But if there’s no chance of us breaking through the wall, she said with only the slightest catch of hesitation in her voice, then why are we searching for damage to the walls? Shouldn’t that be impossible?

  Dauria smiled. Even without her memories, the larger wyrm’s mental faculties were as acute as ever. Right you are. However, we are investigating improbabilities now. And while we at least thought we were preparing for every eventuality, this experience has shown me that not everything could be accounted for.

  Right, Graayyya said, sounding confused.

  Although I don’t think the two of us could muster the strength to break through the wall, Mother Nature is capable of incredible feats. Especially if, as I suspect, we have been sleeping for thousands of years. Just how long the Sleep has been in effect is almost impossible to tell, but I know it has been a very long time. So it is possible, however unlikely, that the right combination of physical assault, quakes, eruptions, and gradual degradation of arcane power may have conspired to weaken some point in a wall enough for us to escape.

  Graayyya raised her brow ridges quizzically. Don’t you think you’re reaching just a bit? That seems a rather extreme set of coincidences.

  Dauria nodded. True. But no more extreme than the one that allowed for the initial formation of life on this planet, coupled with just the right combination of mutations that led to the existence of our ancestors, I should think.

  The garnet shrugged her wings. I suppose that is valid. So what exactly are we looking for?

  As I said, cracks, dings, possibly a hole or even just a shallow recess. Something to signify weakness or thinning in the rock.

  Graayyya nodded and sighed.

  Dauria understood how she felt. This was extremely tedious work that had very little chance of any sort of payoff. But then again, what else did they have to do with their time? It wasn’t as though time was a resource they lacked, and there was very little else in the lair with which they could divert themselves.

  With a nod of her own, Dauria turned from her friend to begin the long, tedious process of searching every claw-width of rock wall in the cave.

  * * * * *

  Although she tried to keep a running tally of time as she went, with no light cycles it was exceedingly difficult to track. At a guess, Dauria would have said they had been searching for days if not weeks. They had given up the search in preference for sleep half a dozen times so far.

  And while it was common for dragons to go several days to a week or more without sleep, she couldn’t discount the possibility that tedium was drawing them to rest more frequently than that.

  In every place they searched, they found nothing but flat, glossy stone with no sign of imperfection.

  On the verge of giving in to her exhaustion, she swam up half a wingspan to a corner where the wall met the ceiling of the cavern. Glancing lazily, doing her best to keep her eyelids open and pay attention, she almost missed it.

  Her gaze roved over the edge again, seeking something that just didn’t look right.

  Her jaw fell open in amazement.

  There it was!

  Somehow, right there at the corner was a seam that appeared to have been fractured from the outside. Several claw-widths of rock had crumbled into the chamber, leaving a jagged opening in the stone.

  Graayyya! she said in a mental shout to get her friend’s attention. You need to come up here. Now.

  Scarcely more than a beat of her heart passed before the garnet was at her side in a swirl of crimson scales. The slight widening of her glowing golden eyes was all the question Dauria needed.

  She couldn’t help being surprised. Even missing huge swaths of her memory, Graayyya was still the same wyrm Dauria had known in all the ways that mattered.

  Rather than waste time with words, she pointed to the breach in the wall with a talon.

  Golden eyes widened still-further until they were almost comically wide. Garnet lips moved soundlessly as the larger wyrm slipped in closer to the breach in the wall to inspect it more closely.

  Dauria backed up and allowed her friend the closer inspection.

  Graayyya was naturally more familiar with the cavern than she was, so she hoped the garnet would be able to see if there was a break in the arcane pattern around the breach. One large enough to allow them to widen the hole, at least. Just enough for them to squeeze through, that was all she asked.

  After a few moments, the garnet raised her claws and rammed her talons into the breach, digging at the jagged edges around it.

  A rush of bubbles came up from the hole in the wall and Graayyya dug at it even harder, though she seemed to be making little progress.

  Dauria wedged herself between the garnet and the ceiling of the chamber to dig her own talons in on the other side of the hole in the wall. Digging at this rock felt like trying to dig at her sire’s scales, so ineffectual was it. But she refused to be deterred. She dug and struck and scraped and ripped at the edges of the breach, scrabbling for every pebble she could dislodge from the wall.

  No matter how long it took, she felt certain that eventually they could expand this breach into a hole big enough for the two of them to escape from. It was only a matter of time.

  The two wyrms worked their way well beyond exhaustion— until Dauria’s vision was skewed and her erratic movements made her feel as though she had consumed a few too many barrels of saké —with little to show for their efforts. As far as Dauria could tell, they hadn’t accomplished a thing. The hole in the wall appeared no larger than it had been when they started.

  But with how exhausted she was, she had to admit she might not be the best judge at present. Perhaps after some rest she would see more clearly. Perhaps they had made more progress than she thought.

  Or, at the very least, perhaps after some rest they might be able to make some read headway toward getting out of this mess.

  With the last of her flagging strength, she followed Graayyya back up to the island. Once there, she moved into the back area by the river of magma and stretched her body taut to relieve the tension in her muscles, then curled up in a ball and closed her eyes.

  Within moments, Graayyya lay scant claw-widths from her. The warmth radiating off the garnet’s body brought her more comfort than she would have thought possible, and soon she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

  * * * * *

  When the two wyrms woke, in wordless agreement they returned to the water and spent another fruitless day hammering and clawing at the small breach in the wall.

  Only when they returned to the dry island in utter exhaustion for the second time did it occur to Dauria that perhaps a brute physical assault was not the best way to go about this.

  When they woke next, she determined that they would try pooling their arcane abilities this time. Surely, that had to work. There had to be a way to break through that breach and escape this lair.

  She could only guess at what was going on up on the surface in her absence, but her instincts told her it couldn’t be anything good. The two of them had been trapped down here for a reason. She suspected they were not the only ones. Could it be that all the elders were similarly trapped? But for that to be true, someone with immense power and influence would have to be behind all this.

  But who could it be?

  Most of the opponents to this plan were brutes with not the intellect or forethought to come up with a plan half as complex as the one they found themselves stuck in.

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  Pushing such thoughts from her mind, she and Graayyya re-entered the water and swam back to the end of the watery tunnel to find the breach again.

  After all, until they could escape this prison, it mattered not at all who was behind it.

  Clasping claws, they merged the streams of their arcane power and directed it toward breaking down the wall’s defenses and blasting apart the hole. Surely, it couldn’t be so difficult to just widen the gap enough to allow themselves egress from this cavern.

  But once more, the pair worked themselves to exhaustion with nothing to show for their efforts.

  The cycle of working at the breach until exhaustion, sleeping, and starting over continued until Dauria lost track of just how many times they had slept since beginning.

  After many, many cycles of working at the breach, as she swam with Graayyya toward it, she asked, can you recall how many days we’ve been at this?

  After a moment’s hesitation, the garnet shook her drooping head. I cannot be certain. Hundreds, certainly.

  Dauria breathed a deep, watery sigh. It had been months, then. Provided their guesses were at least near-accurate and they were living on something approximating a 30-40 hour activity schedule.

  Which is not at all certain, she thought.

  When they reached the breach, she investigated it carefully and used a thin trickle of power from her Apex to catalogue its exact size in her mind.

  Clasping claws with Graayyya, the two wyrms once more set to work at breaking through it. They tried transmuting a small amount of the water near the breach to virulent acid, but it had no effect. Similarly, boiling the water around it and pounding at the breach was not effective. Harkening back to her attempt to break through the entryway into the cave, she threaded a weave of arcane energy around the breach in an effort to pull it apart.

  In the end, she devolved into slamming at the breach and the stone around it with the blade of her tail.

  After what seemed like days, exhaustion prevented her from any further attempts. She had to rest, floating in the water for a time before she could even muster the energy to swim back toward the island above the water.

  Clearly, we were not going to defeat the breach, she said as they swam back toward the surface. She snatched a fish that swam too close to her mouth, chewing and swallowing it whole without truly tasting it.

  Graayyya snarled, but otherwise remained silent.

  No words were necessary, Dauria understood. Angry expressions of their frustration were not going to do them any favors.

  Reaching the surface, she climbed up onto the island and trudged back to the rear of the space to warm herself in the glow of the magma river. Graayyya followed after her, seeming every bit as despondent.

  Dauria sighed as she dropped her bulk to the stone a scant wingspan from the flow of magma.

  Graayyya dropped to the stone ground beside her, a defeated expression marring her features. “What else can we do?”

  Dauria huffed another frustrated breath. She didn’t know. They had tried and tried to budge the stone blocking the entrance into the lair, and apart from moving it less than a claw-width out from its frame, she had seen no result in the effort. They had searched the walls, ceiling, and floor and came up with only the one breach that they could not find a way to widen. What more could they do?

  She shook her head, despairing, and closed her eyes.

  Just a short nap to help clear my head, she thought. There had to be another way out that they weren’t thinking of. There had to be something. She refused to accept that there was no way out.

  Within moments, her thoughts grew fuzzy and she found herself walking through a grassy field next to her sire.

  “Of course there is a way out,” he said. “Clear your head. It will come.”

  “But Sire,” she whined in a voice that sounded much younger than it should have. “I’ve tried everything. Nothing works. This is a better trap than any I have ever seen.”

  “And yet, there are still more possibilities.”

  She scowled. Why couldn’t he just tell her what he was thinking?

  “Think, dear one,” he said, gently chiding.

  With a sigh, she obeyed. What had she not considered? There had to be something. Surely, she had not thought of every possibility.

  Clearing her mind, she set it to the task of analyzing everything she had tried and comparing it against all she knew of the space they were trapped in. There had to be something she was missing.

  Sire smiled down at her, his coppery eyes glowing with pride.

  “The fish,” she gasped suddenly.

  Baalhalllu’s smile widened.

  She had noticed when she first entered that all the fish present were carnivores of similar size. In theory they could all feed on one another, thereby perpetually surviving without there being another food source, so long as their numbers remained more or less equal.

  But fish could not survive in tepid water. Not indefinitely, at least. She was sure of it.

  There had to be a continuous source of flowing water. Nothing else would allow this little ecosystem to thrive. There had to be some kind of vent somewhere that allowed sea water to flow in and out of the cave.

  There had to be.

  “The water. That’s the answer, isn’t it? I just have to find the vents where the water flows in and out of the cave. Right?”

  Sire nodded his approval, but something shifted in his eyes. Was he disappointed?

  No, she thought. That doesn’t make sense.

  But then the look was gone and he was all proud approval.

  “Now you must put your knowledge to work, dear one.”

  Before she had a chance to respond, she opened her eyes and found herself back in the cave, the flowing river of magma before her. She leaped to her claws, brimming with excitement to finally find the way out.

  Then her enthusiasm deflated all at once. If there were such vents, would she not have found them during her search for weaknesses in the watery cave? How could she have missed them?

  She frowned.

  Perhaps Graayyya might know?

  She turned to face her friend, who snored gently from her place next to the magma river. She was loath to wake the garnet, but if there was a way out of this they needed to find it. Sooner rather than later.

  With a nod, she moved toward the garnet and nudged her neck. “Graayyya,” she whispered.

  The golden eyes opened, clear and alert. “What is it?”

  “I have an idea.”

  Graayyya climbed up from the floor to stand before her. “What is it?”

  “Sea water.”

  The garnet stared at her blankly.

  “More specifically, fresh sea water.”

  The golden eyes seemed to light up from within. “Of course!” she said with a slap of her tail against the stone.

  Dauria smiled. “But we’ve been over the entirety of the underwater portions of the cave. Where could the sea water be coming in from?”

  The garnet’s expression fell. “That’s a good question.”

  Dauria’s heart sank. She’d been certain her friend would know. “You don’t remember if, or how, they might have been disguised when your lair was constructed? I have to assume I wasn’t here for that part of it. I never even thought about the problem of a fresh supply of sea water.”

  Graayyya gave a small shrug of her wings. “As absurd as it is, I just don’t remember. I would expect that either it’s disguised by some kind of illusion or perhaps there is some sort of natural buildup that is making it impossible to see. But the larger question is, in either event, what can we do about it?”

  Dauria flashed a sly smile. “We can actually work with this, I think. Provided, of course, you didn’t think to build any defenses against it.”

  The garnet raised her brow ridges in question. “How do you mean?”

  “Arcane Locating. It wouldn’t have worked when looking for a breach because that isn’t specific enough. But for this, I think Locating just might work.”

  Graayyya’s blank stare returned.

  Dauria breathed a silent sigh of frustration. There was so much the garnet did not remember. “My dear, we can use arcane power to find where the water is coming in and where it’s escaping.”

  The expression cleared, though she still looked doubtful. “So… why wouldn’t it have worked before?”

  Dauria nodded and smiled. Though it frustrated her to have to talk through this as though to a wyrmling, at least Graayyya was asking the question instead of pretending to understand. “It is possible that someone more accomplished at Locating might have been able to find that breach with it, but it is not my strongest skill. For me, looking for a breach in the wall would be like searching through a giant pile of pine needles for one specific pine needle that looks just like all the others.”

  Graayyya tilted her head in thought, her eyes rolling upward.

  Clearly, she was trying to wrap her mind around the complexities of it.

  “As opposed to?”

  Dauria nodded. “With this, I’ll have an easier time of it. I’m not looking for a broken piece of wall. I’m looking for a vent or hole or duct that would have been built into the cave. It will have a steady inward and outward flow of sea water that I can track. Because I’m looking for something that isn’t just like everything around it, the going should be much easier.”

  The garnet nodded. “When will you start?”

  “I think I need a good night’s rest before I begin. Although this will be much easier than finding a breach would have been, it still won’t be simple. I need to have a clear head and a full Apex before I attempt it.”

  Another nod, and the garnet settled back to the floor to go back to sleep.

  Dauria struggled not to laugh. She seemed so carefree, absent even the most basic stresses or worries. Was it possible that the greater kindness might be to allow her to keep that, to continue in her current existence without all the cares and pressures of being who she was?

  Would you be content to remain so? asked a soft voice in the back of her mind.

  She shook her head. There was no question, she knew she would not. She would want to know all the things she was missing. She would not want to continue a carefree, blissful existence if it meant losing all those details that made her who she was. Bliss at the expense of not knowing all the things wrong in the world was not bliss, it was ignorance.

  Then you know what you need to do, don’t you?

  She nodded. She had been avoiding it all this time. Especially doing it without Graayyya’s approval. But what else could she do? In her current state, the garnet wouldn’t even understand what she was agreeing to. It was entirely possible she would decline out of some misguided nobility that had no bearing on the current situation.

  With a sigh, she reached deep into her Apex and withdrew the strongest torrent of arcane power she could muster given how exhausted she was. Before she could give herself time to reconsider, she sent the flood of energy into Graayyya.

  Using the force of her power, she burned away any residual effects lingering throughout the garnet’s body. She cycled through the wyrm’s flesh over and over to ensure no malignant forces remained.

  Once she had cycled through the body several times, she moved her arcane energy up into Graayyya’s mind and sent it coursing through the pathways of her brain.

  She was intent on purging any remaining arcane effects there, removing any influence, and cleaning out any blocks or malformed pathways that might be there as a side-effect of the tampering that had been done with her friend’s mind.

  After more than a dozen circuits through the garnet’s mind, however, she found nothing amiss. Not one cell of her friend’s mind was out of place. There were no broken pathways, nothing leading anywhere it shouldn’t. Nothing there hinted at any sort of arcane work.

  Allowing her strength to dissipate, Dauria admitted utter confusion. How could that be? If there was no sign of any arcane tampering whatsoever, then just what had happened to her friend’s mind? What had happened to her memories?

  She spent what seemed like hours turning her mind in continual circles trying to figure out a solution to the question. It made no sense, but she could not deny the truths before her. Clearly something had been done to her friend’s mind, but it showed not the slightest sign of having been tampered with. Clearly, she was dealing with a power far beyond the scope of her knowledge.

  In exhaustion, she slumped back to the floor and allowed sleep to claim her one last time. Surely, when she awoke they would find their way out of here and make their way to the Council.

  The two wyrms stood at the edge of the island overlooking the water. Dauria took a deep breath to calm her thundering heart.

  “Are you ready?” Graayyya asked.

  Dauria almost laughed and held out her claw for the garnet to take.

  When their claws met, Dauria felt a surge of arcane power enter her body and she sent it out along with a flood of her own in the form of a Locating, looking for the point where fresh sea water pumped into the cave.

  Within moments she had its location and she leaped into the water, dragging Graayyya with her. She pulled her friend along after her as she swam for the spot with all the speed she could muster.

  The point was much nearer the island than she would have guessed, being less than a wingspan into the underwater tunnel that led out to the exit from the cave. She slowed as she swam around the curving incline of the roof of the tunnel and came to the point the Locating identified.

  She stared in consternation.

  This was the spot. She knew it was. The Locating had not failed, and she’d never had a false positive from one before. Yet before her she saw only flat, smooth stone. She huffed a frustrated sigh.

  Disguised? Graayyya suggested.

  With a nod, Dauria pulled a stream of arcane power from her Apex to augment that given by Graayyya and channeled it into a Seeing. Although related to Arcane Sight, this was a very different use of the power. Its primary use was to allow one to see through illusions and other arcane disguises. The difficulty lay in that if the creator of the disguise was more powerful, then the Seeing might not reveal anything. It could fail to see through whatever might be hiding before her.

  Numerous spots on the cave ceiling seemed to blur, then glowed with a hazy gray light. The light pulsed three times then vanished, leaving the reality before her clear to see in all its maddening, frustrating glory.

  She clenched her jaw tight and struggled not to scream, lash out, or both.

  For nearly three wingspans in each direction, small holes marred the surface of the ceiling like pock marks. Each was little wider than a talon, yet together they allowed in enough new sea water to keep the tunnel circulating and clean.

  She turned to Graayyya, trying not to be angry. How could you not be aware of this?

  The garnet’s eyes widened, her mouth slightly agape in a hopeless expression. She gave a barely perceptible shrug of her wings. I don’t know, Dauria. I have no memory of even being aware that there was a method of bringing fresh sea water into the cave.

  Dauria lowered her head. She could hear the truth in her friend’s words, but that didn’t make them any easier to bear. What was she supposed to do now? There was little doubt the water’s exit from the tunnel would be similarly guarded. So little doubt, in fact, that she had no desire to check it for certainty.

  She cursed herself for a fool. Of course it would not have been that easy. Graayyyavalllia had always been among the wisest of Dragonkind, naturally she would not have left such an obvious threat to her sleeping space. Who knew what dangers could enter through a single water vent into her lair if it was large enough to accommodate even a small dragon?

  Similarly, she had no desire to test the integrity of the rock around the holes. She had no doubts whatsoever that this part of the cave would be every bit as strongly protected as the rest.

  Which left…

  What, exactly?

  She closed her eyes, despairing, and tried to think. What else was there? What else could she do?

  Distantly, she felt a wave brush over her as Graayyya swam away. Doubtless to test the very things she herself didn’t have the heart to bother with. The exit vent. Its integrity. Perhaps the garnet would even test the integrity of this one.

  But Dauria was done. She didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. They were stuck here and she couldn’t find any way around it.