The next morning, after an amazing night’s sleep, I was practically kicked awake. A certain young lady had no problems snuggling in and using me as a living, breathing heated blanket, and when she woke she sure treated me like one. I’d curled around her and wrapped us both in my wings, like I usually would, but when morning came around she was far too excited to get going to wait for little things like me waking up before squirming loose and getting up.

  “Old Mallin!” She kept her voice to an excited hiss so that she wouldn’t disturb the much larger dragon sleeping in the other end of the temple, but she was practically dancing in place as she got dressed. Her clothes had been drying all night on a rack by a low fire, and looked nice and dry now. “We get to explore Old Mallin! Come on, we’ve waited long enough!”

  “Long enough” meant most of the previous day. It had been around noon, perhaps, when we arrived, but my mother was absolutely knackered after flying more than three hundred miles, round trip. A drawback of being so bloody big, I assumed. She’d extracted a promise from me not to leave the city, then curled up around a massive central statue of three women and went to sleep. She still lay there in the morning. Herald and I had spent the rest of the day setting up a sort of indoor camp, where she could cook, take care of her gear, and dry her clothes. Theoretically she could also warm herself by the fire and sleep there, but we both knew that she’d be using me for that, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Once she’d set everything up she’d changed to a dry set of clothes, then spent most of the afternoon poking around the half of the temple that didn’t put her anywhere close to Reaper. You could tell that anything that could easily be carried off had been, but there was still much to see. She’d Oooo'd and Aaah'd over altars set into vaulted alcoves, and murals, their colors still bright, along the walls between them. There was at least one upper floor, as well, and possibly more, but Herald would have had to get around my mother to access the stairs. Despite all the courage she’d shown, she wasn’t quite up to that yet. Life or death situations were one thing, but curiosity clearly wasn’t enough of a motivation to get close to Reaper.

  Reaper. I wondered what she herself would think about that. Would she be amused? Annoyed? Flattered or offended? What did she call herself? “Sower of Embers, Reaper of Flame” was quite a mouthful, and when she mentioned my father she’d simply called him “Night.” I doubted that was his full name. I’d have to ask her about it.

  While I thought about this, Herald had gotten dressed, fetched the pot that she’d left under a spout to fill with rainwater, and set it to boil as she prepared hard tack, dried meat and fruits, and some hard cheese to make the weird porridge that was ninety percent of an adventurer’s diet while in the field.

  “Where should we start?” she asked, her face alight with excitement. “I was thinking of the fortress up the hill. It is partially collapsed, but it is so close, and, I mean, a fortress! Perhaps it is a palace? A fortress on top of a hill is where I would want to live if I was queen of the island, somewhere I could see the whole city. What do you think?”

  “Sounds like just the place for a queen,” I said, happy to let myself be infected by her energy. “Do you think anyone’s explored it before?”

  “The fortress? If they did, it is not common knowledge. The only accounts I have read of anyone actually reaching this city never got far inside the walls, or stayed close to the harbor if they came by boat. It is simply too dangerous. But I have you!” She beamed at me, and I knew that I would burn the world to see her smile like that again. “And thanks to you, I have some tricks to keep me safe.”

  “And,” I added, “my mother has cleared out the nearby Nest Hearts and scared off the monsters. That should help.”

  “And that,” Herald agreed graciously.

  Before Reaper settled in to sleep, I’d asked her about safety. Herald’s safety, that was. The concentration of Nest Hearts had steadily increased as we went north, and in the ruined city it was far beyond anything I’d experienced. I imagined that monsters must be everywhere.

  “Oh, I harvested the nearby rifts,” she’d told us. “Quite a treat, after such a long journey. Do not worry. The monsters fled when I arrived, and they should not be so foolish as to try to get close to this place. The lowest gremlin and the greatest troll both know to avoid a dragon.”

  That didn’t quite match my experience with the creatures, but she was probably right in her own case. I couldn’t see a troll, even a big male, doing much more than annoying Reaper before she literally bit his head off.

  When Herald had eaten and prepared her gear I took a long look at my mother. She was sleeping soundly, long, relaxed breaths kicking around the dust and leaves that had found their way inside the incredibly well preserved temple. I let her lie. All she’d said was to not leave the city. If she woke and wondered where we were, she’d already shown that she could easily find me.

  “All right, little dragon,” I told Herald. “Let’s go poke around some ancient ruins!”

  To leave the temple we had to climb a slope of soil that had built up over the centuries, but at least it was clear. Reaper had burned a large area outside of the temple free of vegetation, to the point where only cracked and withered chunks of coal remained of once mighty trees, and the deep soil was black and even glassy at points. At the edges of the burn the trees were damaged, but the rain had controlled the flames well enough that they hadn’t spread. Beyond that the ruined city was as much forest as anything else.

  The rain hammered down as it always did, but Herald was practically vibrating with excitement, and it was impossible not to vibe right along with her. There was something about this dead city that felt alive on a whole different level. The dirty light was brighter, the air fresher than farther south. Add to that that no one had set foot here since the Cataclysm, and how could we not be excited?

  We started uphill. The street we followed was covered in deep soil, and trees grew wherever they wished. We walked slowly, mostly because Herald kept stopping to look at things, ducking through half-buried doorways and windows to look inside collapsed buildings. Practically everything was ruined, but there were enough walls standing that we could easily tell how everything had been laid out, with straight, regular streets and small blocks.

  “The buildings are so large,” Herald said with wonder, pacing out a particularly big one as we passed. “Eighty paces! About two hundred and forty feet! Not the biggest building I have ever seen, but you would have to go to the Forum to find anything bigger in Karakan! And it is so… whole! What do you think it was? Some rich family’s residence?”

  “Could be. But my guess would be something administrative. Like a ministry of something or other.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Not entirely sure. The whole area just has that kind of official feeling. Like, no walled off gardens. I’d expect gardens for people’s homes. Though they could be behind the buildings, I guess.” I paused and considered the large building we’d just passed. Like she’d said, it was very well preserved. Almost too well. From the street I couldn’t tell if the roof was still on, but it wasn’t obvious that it had collapsed or anything. “Want to check it out?”

  “What about the fortress?” Herald asked, but I didn’t say anything. She was interested. She could see the same things as me, and I could almost see the wheels turning. The walls were too clean, their carved decorations still clearly visible except where climbing vines had covered them. The large, recessed doors were closed, as were all the windows, not one of them decayed or broken open by weather, time, or monsters. She walked along the front of the building, knocking on the shutters, which she could easily reach thanks to the ground being three feet higher than when the place was built. They were made of oiled or stained wood, and still looked practically new after hundreds of years.

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  Something was going on. Probably some enchantment, like whatever had preserved the temple.

  “The fortress is not going anywhere,” she finally said, half to herself. “Let us see if we can get inside!”

  That was, of course, easier said than done. At least without doing damage. I offered to simply tear one of the shutters off, but even the suggestion horrified Herald. “Bad enough that your mother tore the doors of that temple,” she said sternly. “Gods only know what will happen now that the weather and any passing creature can get in. No. Please, Draka.”

  “Just a suggestion,” I muttered, thoroughly scolded. “I wouldn’t just do it.”

  She softened instantly, reaching out to scratch my nub horn. “I know. But I would rather not see the inside of this place than be responsible for something like that.”

  I dug the doors out, which didn’t take too long. I didn’t have my mother’s giant hands, but I was strong, and I didn’t tire. Shifting fifty or so cubic feet of soil, roots and all, wasn’t much of a challenge. The biggest problem was the rain washing loose soil back down and turning it into mud, which spattered everywhere as I worked and made Herald move off far enough that I couldn’t, in her words, “pelt her with mud anymore.”

  It was only one handful, and it wasn’t even on purpose! Sure, it got her pretty good, and she was hacking and spitting for a good minute after. I might have laughed at her. That was no reason to go sook, was it?

  The whole exercise didn’t do any good, anyway. I would’ve had to break the doors down somehow, and I wasn’t so sure that I could. They had an air of indestructibility, and knocking on them just gave me a sharp tapping, like they were made of stone.

  “How about the roof?” Herald suggested. “There must be a chimney or something up there. Think you could get in that way?”

  “You’re brilliant, and I love you,” I told her. “Wait here.”

  The doors were set deep enough into the wall that Herald could shelter there while I flew up to take a look. The roof looked as whole as the rest of the building, though the leaves of years upon years had created patches of soil where everything from ferns to small trees grew. More importantly, and just as Herald had suggested, there were four chimneys set evenly around the rectangular building.

  There was also a small garden open area behind it, but it looked like it was shared with the other buildings of the same block. Another strike, in my mind, against the idea of this being a residence.

  The chimneys were all identical, about a foot square and with wide covers to keep the rain out. A foot wasn’t much and I was a growing girl, but in my shadow form I was pretty bloody malleable, and I’d squeezed through worse not too long ago, exploring Karakan’s storm drains. I picked one of the two chimneys closer to the front of the building, then Shifted, stretched, and squeezed myself inside.

  Going inside a chimney was much more interesting than I’d expected. I’d thought that it would just be a straight shot down to a fireplace or furnace, but not at all! With my shadowsight it was bright as day in there, and I could see how the flue twisted and turned, with many smaller channels joining it along the way. I was squeezed as it was and didn’t even try to follow those, but at least I learned something.

  I was also hopelessly lost after the first several bends, so I couldn’t tell where in the building I was when I finally emerged into a large, contained space of some kind, like an oven or a furnace. As luck would have it a door stood open before me, and I emerged into something like a utility room.

  Looking behind me, the thing I’d just come out of definitely looked like a furnace. There were even thick pipes connected to it, emerging from the wall and disappearing into the ceiling. Or the other way around. My guess was that it was for heating water, and that I was in a basement.

  The first thing that really struck me was how clean it was. No dust or dirt or litter or anything else that I would’ve expected in a boiler room back home. The second was how comfortably cool the air was, and how dry.

  An open doorway led into a corridor, from which a stone staircase brought me up to a closed wooden door. I Shifted back and tried it; it was unlocked, and the latch and hinges moved smoothly and with barely a sound.

  I stepped out onto the ground floor of the building, and what I saw took my breath away.

  Much later I was curled around Herald, on the floor of the large, open main space of the building. She’d been lying there since shortly after I let her in. It had been at least two hours since then, but she was still overwhelmed by what we’d found.

  We’d both been wrong. The building wasn’t a residence. Nor was it administrative.

  It was a library.

  Most of the shelves had gaping holes where books had been removed, but there were still thousands upon thousands of scrolls, folders, and bound books remaining, all of them as well preserved as the one we’d found at the ruined villa somewhere halfway between Old Mallin and Karakan.

  Herald had barely been able to breathe once she realized what the building was. She’d walked in a daze, her eyes brimming with tears as we looked at the still well filled shelves on the first floor — and there was an open second floor, equally full of shelves, above us.

  Then her eyes had landed on a leather folder. When the light of the stone in her hand fell on it, two lines of text were visible, crisp and clear as though they’d been laid down just yesterday. One line was in the indecipherable script of the Old Mallinean language.

  The other was in a different script, which Herald recognized as an older version of the script still used for Tekereteki to this day.

  Slowly, letter by letter, word by word, she read it out. It was hard to understand her. Not only because she wasn’t fluent in the script, or because the Tekereteki was hundreds of years old, but because her voice shook as she spoke, and she had to get the syllables out between gasps and sobs and hiccups.

  The final title she arrived at was A Primer for the Tekyeritekhi Tongue, with Transliterations and Translations.

  I couldn’t tell how long she spent on the floor after that, barely breathing, clutching the folder to her chest. She’d found a Rosetta Stone for the Old Mallinean language, and she was entirely overwhelmed, drifting in and out of sleep, crying and babbling incoherently when she was awake. All I could do was to stay with her, and give her time.

  The first complete sentence that I heard out of her was, “They protected this place. The fortress collapsed, but they protected this place!” She started crying again, and it was another quarter of an hour before I coaxed her up off the floor.

  “I need to copy this,” she sniffled, holding the folder tight as she pushed herself to her feet. “I cannot take it out from here. What if… This changes everything! I cannot risk it getting damaged. We need to find some ink and paper, papyrus, anything.”

  “You don’t want to—” I started, conscious of how long she’d been crying on the floor and figuring that there would be any number of things she might need to take care of. My intentions were good.

  “Ink! Pen! Paper!”

  We got to looking for some writing materials.

  We spent the rest of the day there, well into the evening. I got some food and water in her, and got her out the door when her uncomfortable shifting became impossible to ignore, but otherwise she sat at a desk, laboriously copying the first however many pages of the Primer onto a stack of papers we’d found along with a mass of other stationery in one of the many cabinets that stood along the walls near the entrance.

  I practically had to drag her back to the temple, long after sunset. I nearly resorted to simply ordering her to come with me, something I’d told myself I would never do and which I wasn’t entirely sure if it would work, but she relented when I pointed out that she was starting to nod, and her penmanship on the last page was getting sloppy. As much as she wanted to keep working, she didn’t want to waste paper or end up with a poor manuscript.

  She put everything in order before we left, taking her finished work with her, “In case we need to leave suddenly.” And she insisted on Shifting and going the whole way like that since, while the rain hit her, it didn’t actually make her wet.

  It wasn’t too far back to the temple, but she was already tired when we left the library. She was absolutely knackered when we got back, and barely got her clothes off before collapsing into her bedroll.

  “‘m cold,” she muttered, snuggling in. No surprise, either. She hadn’t bothered to make a fire or anything. “Come an…”

  She trailed off, and cold or not, her breathing became soft and regular almost immediately.

  “I’ll be with you in a second,” I whispered, pulling the furs closer around her. Then I turned my attention to the back of the temple.

  My mother was watching us.

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