I’d just passed out in front of my mother after eating a Nest Heart. As far as I was concerned, that was perfectly normal. She clearly didn’t see it that way.

  “Tell me, child! Has this happened before? You do not seem concerned or surprised!”

  I considered lying, telling her that no, this was the first time and I had no idea what she was talking about. And just as soon as that though came it vanished. I wasn’t sure if it was possible to lie to her, not directly. More importantly, I didn’t want to. Not because I was concerned about what she might do if she caught me lying, but because she just seemed so out of sorts.

  “It always happens when I eat a Heart — consume a Rift, I mean,” I told her, trying to calm her. “But it’s fine! Really, it’s fine! I feel awesome! Don’t worry!”

  It didn’t calm her in the least. She only curled tighter around me, nuzzling me with her snout as though to reassure herself that I was still there and alive.

  “Little one, when it happened, I could not feel you anymore. Do you understand? Your thread vanished, like it had been cut. It has been so strong and bright today, barely waning at all, and from one moment to the next, it was gone. I thought you died!”

  What do you say to that? When telling her that I felt fine didn’t help? If she’d been a scared old lady I might have asked if she wanted a hug, but she was literally three times my size in every dimension, and what I knew about myself and about Instinct meant that the future suddenly looked far more uncertain than it had an hour before. I thought back on the looks she’d been giving me all day, those odd looks I hadn’t been able to interpret, and I wondered if she’d simply been pleased. Evaluating me, since my thread was apparently unusually bright, whatever that meant to her.

  So what, I asked myself, was I supposed to do? Reassure her? Deceive her? Wait to see what she did?

  It wasn’t that hard, in the end. Even if I myself hadn’t felt bad for the old girl, Conscience was stirring, and she wasn’t happy. So what do you do when someone’s hurting, and doesn’t want to listen to you?

  You keep trying.

  “I’m okay,” I said, hesitantly rubbing my cheek against hers. Then I remembered how she didn’t like how human I sounded, so I tried to channel my inner Herald and said, “I am unharmed. This happens every time, and I have never been hurt by it. There is nothing to worry about.”

  “Even now, your thread is faint,” she murmured. With her snout against my side, I felt her words as much as I heard them.

  “I don’t know what that means. I have threads that guide me to Rifts, and those become stronger when I get closer, but it doesn’t sound like that is what you mean.”

  “I do not know, either,” she admitted. “Distance is a part, but within a day’s flight it should remain constant. Yours has always waxed and waned in brightness, and you are so strange. I cannot help but think that these things are connected.”

  I snorted, forgetting that I was supposed to be trying to calm her. “Strange. Just what any child wants to hear from their mother.”

  “Just like that!” She drew her head back so she could look me in the eyes. “What dragon responds in such a way? If you feel I have insulted you, you should bear it silently so as not to provoke me, or you should bite back, to show that you are confident in your ability to weather my anger! No dragon would respond with… with…”

  “Snark?” I suggested.

  “Yes! Snark! A few months living with humans should not change you so!”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, absolutely truthfully. I knew full well what was “wrong” with me, but I couldn’t exactly tell her. I thought of her, and spoke of her, as my mother, but that wasn’t entirely correct. She was Instinct’s mother. If I were created from a mix of Conscience and Instinct, then Embers was my grandmother, at best. Which wasn’t the point. The point was that I did not want to find out how she’d react to the news that her actual daughter was little more than a passenger in the body that I’d taken over.

  Perhaps she’d understand — she seemed like a might-makes-right, possession-is-nine-tenths kind of person. But there was also the chance that she’d go on a rampage or try to find a way to eliminate myself and Conscience, or to put Instinct in permanent control, and I couldn’t take that risk. Not without a stronger position or knowing her better.

  Something popped into my head. Something I could give her to help her draw her own conclusions, right or wrong. Something I’d wanted to look into for a while, but which had always been a low priority. A reason for me to go home, perhaps with her blessing, and… yeah. This was coming together nicely!

  “When I awoke,” I told her carefully, “it was in a round pit, surrounded by stones with something engraved on them. Some kind of enchantment, I assume, which kept me trapped in time. How, I have no idea. I don’t know anything about magic or enchantments, really. But those stones are still there, and I’ve been meaning to have a scholar or three look at them.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Not suspiciously, but with interest. Curiosity, perhaps — she did show a lot of that. “You have mentioned this before. That you have only vague memories of your first years, before you woke to full consciousness. And you are certainly much more mature than any child of mine at your size — though your father was not very large. Do you think this presumed enchantment altered you somehow?”

  I very deliberately did the dragon head-wiggle shrug instead of a human one. “Perhaps. I never thought of myself as being strange or wrong, but this seems like a good reason to finally get this looked into.”

  Embers rumbled, thoughtful and unhappy. “I do not like that you lost consciousness.”

  “Of course not. What mother would?”

  “Keeping the Rifts under control, and taking their power, it is too important.”

  “I wouldn’t wish to go without it,” I agreed, stowing the first part of the statement away for later. “Whatever may be different about me, is there anything you can do about it? Now, I mean.”

  She huffed. “No.”

  “The humans may be able to puzzle out what was done to me.”

  “And you trust them?”

  “Not entirely. But I can control them.”

  She laid her head down on the sodden floor of the forest that covered the city, facing away from me. Something dragons rarely did, if I understood her lesson correctly. It meant losing all of the nuance of the draconic tongues, reducing anything said to the most basic. I wondered if she did it unconsciously, as a way of showing that she wanted to express herself on that level. Or maybe she just took into consideration that we were speaking Karakani.

  “You wish to leave again.”

  “I do.”

  “A day here, a day there. Is this how you would have it?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “No,” I said honestly. “If I thought it would not cause the humans to panic and lead to a mass amount of problems, I would have you return to Karakan with me, so you could see for yourself how I’m doing.” I didn’t add that she would probably be the direct source of a lot of those problems, when something happened that she didn’t like.

  “I could return to this city with you in any case. You could not stop me, and they could not do more than annoy me.”

  “I know. I’m asking you not to.”

  “Give her something!” Conscience snapped at me. “I’ll damn well fight you on this. You’re breaking her heart!”

  I wasn’t sure that I was. It seemed much more likely to me that she was faced with a situation she couldn’t or wasn’t willing to solve with force or bullying lest she risk the relationship we’d been building, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Of course, I was basing that on myself, and even more on Instinct, and Embers had about seven hundred years on us. It wasn’t impossible that her emotional range was somewhat more developed than… how had Herald put it, when I told her about Instinct? “A tyrannical toddler?”

  Yeah. Perhaps some kind of compromise was in order.

  “I don’t have to leave now,” I said, relaxing back into the nest she’d made for me with her belly and her tail. “Today has been good. How about I stay another day, maybe two, and then I go and get things started? Then I can come back. Or maybe you come to my mountain. You remember where my father’s lair was?”

  She lifted her head and looked at me. “Of course I remember,” she said haughtily.

  “It is much closer to the city than here. Perhaps you could find a cave nearby? I don’t know. It would be nice if it didn’t take three hours to get to you.”

  “Hrrm. Perhaps,” she said. She looked pleased at that last part. “We can discuss it tomorrow.”

  “Sure. Tomorrow.”

  We spent the rest of that day, and all of the next, continuing my lessons. But we did it my way. I’d never been good at sitting still in class and had received more than one scolding for disruptive behavior, so with a little cajoling I convinced my mother to teach me on the move, while going about the overgrown ruins of the city. We had to stop every so often so that I could focus on her mimics, or for her to burn away a swathe of trees, upright or fallen, but otherwise it worked quite well.

  She let me lead the way, a parent indulging their child, and I took us in the general direction of the shore and the harbor. Much like Karakan, this city had a large natural harbor which had been improved with two massive breakwaters. They must have been genius engineers, the Old Mallineans; the quay and piers, just like the breakwaters, were practically intact after the five centuries or whatever since the city was abandoned. Obviously, engineering could only do so much; the warehouses and other buildings that weren’t just solid lumps of stone and concrete hadn’t fared any better than the rest of the city.

  On the northern side of the harbor rose the tall spire of stone with the ruined fortress, and on the southern were cliffs, not terribly high but high enough that the ocean spray didn’t reach the remains of the no-doubt once magnificent villas at their top.

  I chose the harbor because I wanted to do some swimming. Convincing Embers wasn’t hard. Being able to swim was apparently rare among dragons, though most could gracelessly make it to the shore if they had to. She was curious to see what I could do.

  I’d gotten some practice during the day before we attacked Vestel, but it hadn’t been much. I’d spent most of that time leaving the city and getting back again, with less than an hour actually spent in the water. And it had been raining, which probably didn’t actually make any difference, but it felt like it should. I’d never liked swimming in the rain. Andrea had loved it. Probably still did. Sometimes she’d drag me along to the lake when it rained, even though I’d just sit on the grass and never get in. She’d laugh at me, I’d say I’d be fine with her getting struck by lightning, ‘cause I’d have the whole bed to myself… we had a whole thing.

  God, I thought, standing at the edge of the badly weathered quay. I haven’t thought of Andrea in weeks. I barely thought of anything from my old life anymore. Conscience’s old life, more like. We’d been so close. We’d lived together, borrowed each others’ clothes, hell, we’d shared a bed for ten days before we got the sofa bed. We always told people we were roommates rather than flatmates. We’d been closer than most sisters I’d known.

  And I hadn’t thought of her for weeks.

  I felt like having a cry, but I was a dragon. Dragons didn’t cry. Not in front of their mothers, at any rate.

  Speaking of, Embers was looking at me with concern. When I acknowledged her she asked, “What is wrong, daughter? Your thread is fading again.”

  And then it clicked. In hindsight it was obvious. I just had no way of explaining to her.

  “I can’t say,” I told her, and leaped into the water, magically acquired reflexes and my newly streamlined body cutting the surface smoothly. A lie by omission, followed by running away. She wouldn’t like this, I was sure of that, but it was better than telling her what I’d just put together. I’d been feeling more lost, more emotional, more human than I had for a long time, and my thread, as she saw it, had dimmed. How could that possibly be a coincidence?

  I swam tight circles near the shore to buy time to think. With my wings tightly tucked, arms and legs trailing behind me, my tail propelled me quickly through the water with powerful croc-like beats. My closed second eyelids let me see clearly. The water was too murky to see far, but it amused and distracted me to watch the small fish scatter, and crabs scuttle out of the way on the bottom.

  Instinct was completely unbothered by the entire sequence of events of my nostalgic guilt, Mother’s concern, and my following revelation and uncertainty about what to tell her. She was in the mood for seafood.

  And… could it possibly be that simple? It wouldn’t help with what to tell Embers, but it might alleviate her worries a bit.

  I let Instinct take the wheel. Not entirely, not like when I’d had my rage filled redouts, but in the sense that I let her impulses guide me. And her impulses told me to eat a crab or five.

  They crunched deliciously between my teeth.

  There weren’t any half-submerged stones here, like at the shore where I’d practiced. Getting back out of the water might have been a problem, but only if I thought about it too much. Instinct didn’t. She decided that we were done — the crabs had been fun and tasty, but we weren’t actually hungry — so she simply had us build up speed, turn sharply for the surface, then unfurl our wings and claw our way into the air, water running off our scales to shower back into the harbor. We took a turn in the air to dry off, then went back and landed next to Mother, who’d laid down where we left her.

  “A fine Advancement,” we told her in greeting. “I wish it had been offered sooner.”

  “You swim gracefully,” Mother said. There was no worry on her face anymore, only relief and pride. “And this was only your second time?”

  “One of my first flights landed me in a lake,” we confessed. It was an embarrassment that we would only tell our closest friends, but with her we felt comfortable. “A lake lizard tried to eat me. I won, but I have been wary of water ever since.”

  “I am not surprised. You are quite the little warrior, from what Herald told me,” she said, and we preened under her praise. “So, what happened before? You quite effectively dodged the question.”

  “Old, pointless worries,” we said, with a wiggle of our head. “I needed to clear my head.”

  She chuffed with satisfaction. “Well, the swim seems to have worked wonders. Come now. Let us continue your lesson.”

  And so we did. Monsters and animals, Advanced or otherwise, fled before us as we walked and she taught. It was so easy like this, letting Instinct lead. My own concerns seemed so far off, and there was a calm to the young dragon that I shared my head with that I’d rarely seen. She knew, and I knew through her, that with Mother we were perfectly safe. Mother would never harm us, and no creature under heaven would dare challenge Mother.

  I’d read somewhere, long ago, that until a certain age most children see their parents as benign gods, loving and all-powerful. That was how Instinct saw Embers, and there was an enormous comfort in just relaxing and letting myself feel that through her. I knew that it couldn’t last, and I accepted that, but I also felt like I deserved it. Instinct deserved it. We had been through a lot, and we had a lot in front of us. There was no harm in spending a day or two being a child again.

  We continued until the sun began to set, and then we flew back to the temple. There we talked more, and we tried to mix in a little Draconic where we could. But Mother was tired, so we slept early and long, and without an excited human to wake me we slept long into the morning. The next morning the clouds had broken up somewhat, and actual, direct sunlight came through. We repeated the previous day; more walking, more flying, more lessons, more simple, relaxed comfort. We consumed another Rift, and after that we were absolutely full, with the power of five of the things in our Heart.

  When we returned to the temple that night, Mother told us, “Tomorrow you should go back to your friends. Little Herald must be worried.”

  “I hope not. Our other sister, Makanna, can feel what I feel,” we said. “And these days have been good ones. But I am sure that they miss me.”

  “I am sure,” she agreed, eyes wrinkling. “But stay with your old mother tonight, and I will see you off in the morning. Then take what time you need. If I miss you, or if I worry, I will come to you, but I will not enter the city. You can simply take wing and let me know that you are well.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” we said, then, after just a heartbeat’s hesitation, walked up and lay down beside her. She curled her tail around us and covered us with one of her ship’s sail wings, and like that, luxuriating in the same comfort that we could offer our humans, we drifted off to a perfect, blissful sleep.

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