“That was a place of dragons,” Sashaak said. The creature breathed out, and then as he did, the glyphs that had been in the other chamber were suddenly placed inside this one. It was remarkable. Laric felt some sort of tugging sensation inside of him as the power—and the potential, he had to admit—simply drained out of Sashaak and floated out into the room. The glyphs were simply deposited.
And as he felt that, he couldn’t help but wonder if this was how glyphs were formed in the first place. What did he know about them, anyway?
His grandmother was some sort of a glyph master, right? But how was she a glyph master like this?
“What do you mean that that was a place of dragons?” Laric asked.
Sashaak lay down in the middle of the chamber, and there was a little flood of power, and something of an energy that seemed to diminish, floating outward. As Laric recognized it, he wondered if maybe there would be some part of it that he could feel, or maybe it was not meant to radiate to him.
“It was a place of dragons,” Sashaak said simply.
“This is a place of dragons?” Laric asked.
“You mean the dragons left the glyphs?” Rowan asked. She was seemingly much more comfortable with Sashaak than she had been before. Laric was glad. He was going to need her to be comfortable.
“I mean that it is a place of dragon death.”
Chapter Eight
Sashaak had curled up, and he seemed as if he didn’t want to have any sort of conversation about what he had meant. Laric took a moment to make his way around the cave and study the glyphs. They looked to be the same as they had been before, though he couldn’t be certain.
Rowan followed him. “What did the dragon mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were saying something about these glyphs. What was it?”
Laric frowned as he paused in front of one section of the glyphs. There didn’t seem to be anything obvious that was going to help him identify anything else about the glyphs, but that was what he needed so that he could understand the truth of them. “I don’t get how the dragon was able to transport the glyphs like this. It’s like he simply took them in, held them as we came through the portal, and then left them here.”
“That seems exactly like what he did,” Rowan said.
She was looking at Sashaak, and there was a curiosity to her gaze that Laric couldn’t quite interpret. Was she thinking about what it might be like if she were to have the same dragon connection? That was something Laric would understand, as he couldn’t help but feel as if the others needed to have something like that.
“He said he knew the dragon,” Laric said. He kept his voice soft, not wanting the words to carry too far because he didn’t want to upset anyone, but he thought that he needed to get something across to her. “Which meant that there had been a dragon in that place before. I already learned that my grandmother had some connection to Korthal, so what if she also had a connection to dragons?”
“You know that she did,” Rowan said, turning to face him. “You’re just struggling with it. You don’t have to, though. You have someone—or something—you can ask now. The dragon knows things. And if he’s willing to talk to you, it seems that he would be willing to explain to you more about your family. That is, if you want to learn.”
There was no question in Laric’s mind that he wanted to learn. He’d never known that his grandmother had been hiding some secret from him. She was just his grandmother. But learning what he had about her left him wondering if there might be a way for him to know more about what she had done before she had come to their town. Maybe she had come with a specific purpose.
“Let me have a few minutes to talk to the dragon,” Laric said.
Rowan nodded. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“I think I need to see what the dragon is willing to share if I go to him on my own. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. I understand that you need to do this—just know that we’re here for you. And once you do this, we’re going to have to figure out what our next step will be.”
She was right, and Laric knew that she was right. They couldn’t stay here indefinitely, even though he felt as if there was so much that he needed to learn. He was going to have to figure out where they were going to go. Whether that was going back to town, or hunting for more dragons, or trying to make sense of what the mages were doing, they were going to need to have some plan in place once he had an opportunity to talk to Sashaak and better understand everything the dragon had been doing and why he had come here.
“See what the others think,” Laric told her.
She nodded and headed away from him.
Laric approached Sashaak carefully, vaguely aware of some strangeness coming off him. Most of that sense seemed to be radiating from the fact that Sashaak was all curled up, and seemed as if he were trying to protect something. Laric had no idea what it was, only that the dragon had wrapped himself around some section of the glyphs and looked like he was just waiting, though Laric didn’t know what he was waiting for. He hesitated a moment, but then Sashaak growled. It was an odd, almost violent sound.
“I’m not trying to do anything to upset you,” Laric said. “I just came here to see if you could help me understand what you were going on about in there.”
Sashaak breathed out, and steam and a bit of flame trickled out of his nostrils. “It is nothing,” the dragon said.
“You said that place was a place of dragon death.”
“Yes,” Sashaak said.
“What does that mean?”
Sashaak turned his head, looking over to Laric. “You do not understand death?”
“I understand death perfectly well,” Laric said. Irritation flared inside him. It had been doing that more often of late. “I understand it quite well these days because of how other dragons destroyed most of my town and killed people I cared about. So yes, I understand death.”
Sashaak growled again, then lowered his head to the ground. “That was a place where the dragon lost its life.”
“And you knew that dragon?”
“Yes.”
“My grandmother knew about that place,” Laric said, approaching carefully again, and starting to question whether he needed to be more cautious with this dragon. He didn’t think that he did, but then again, he didn’t know if Sashaak was going to cause any problems for him, or if he would just be willing to listen.
“I do not know who she was,” Sashaak said.
