The weird thing was that Laric did feel it. He had placed some of the protections, and in doing so, he was able to hold on to them and secure them enough that what he had placed, and how he had placed them, meant that he could determine the origin of those glyphs and what they would do.
“I don’t want just to hold it,” Laric said. “I want to know how to pass through it and keep her from causing problems.”
“You do not need to worry,” Sashaak said.
“Well, I think we do. We’re going to have some practical problems regarding her and what she can do. We certainly don’t want to starve her.”
Rowan, who had been standing nearby, looked over to him. “We don’t?”
“Wait,” Laric said, “you want to starve her?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think that’s necessarily the worst idea.”
“Rowan,” Iveris said.
Even Laric felt a little bit surprised by that.
“I think we need answers, and I’m not sure we will be able to get them if we starve her,” he said. “I was hoping that she would volunteer them, but I think she’s going to need to struggle and suffer inside that chamber for a little while before we can coax her into telling us anything.”
Rowan let out a long, frustrated sigh. “You’re right. I… I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You’re thinking that you’ve endured enough pain because of what she did,” Laric said.
They all had, but that didn’t make it any easier on them.
He looked over to where his sister was still standing, though Joselle wasn’t watching him. A part of him suspected that she’d have some potential as well, but she would have to learn how to access it. Unlike Laric, she hadn’t had a chance to work with their grandmother, so she wouldn’t have learned about the potential similarly.
Even for Laric, learning that he was somehow dragonborn was a strange realization. He didn’t know what that would mean for him, but it connected him to a kind of power that he’d only been vaguely aware of before learning that it existed. And if he could draw on some of that power, shouldn’t he master it?
Sashaak watched him. The creature was massive. Easily as large as the shed where they’d hidden from the attack and verging on as significant as his family’s farmhouse. He could imagine Sashaak snapping forward and biting him—consuming him in a single chomp.
“You fear that I would eat you?” the dragon asked.
Laric staggered back a step. He’d been feeling at ease around a dragon and now he’d gotten close. Too close.
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
That would be a terrifying thing if true.
“Do you think the emotions of humans are so complex?” Sashaak said.
Laric shrugged. He supposed that he hadn’t given any thought to the emotions of humans. The only thing he’d ever considered was that dragons were assumed to be dangerous. And given what he’d seen of the attack on his town and his people, they were unsafe.
“I guess I didn’t give it a lot of thought.”
Sashaak huffed. “You are too small. And it would not serve me well to consume you. We are to be bonded. That is what he wanted.”
There was again that sense of sadness from Sashaak. Laric thought that peculiar. All the stories he’d ever heard about Korthal suggested that they harnessed their dragons, forcing them to serve. Before the attack, Laric hadn’t known they could use the dragon power, but even in that, it made a certain sense.
“What will that mean for us?” Laric asked.
“It will mean what it means,” the dragon said.
“Does it mean I will draw potential through you?”
That was what he’d done during the attack. It had been a surprising realization, but Laric had been calling on significant power—more than he would have been able to do on his own. That power had flooded through him, and though he still struggled to direct it, there had been something to the way he’d been using that power that had allowed him to control it.
The potential. That was what it was.
But Laric needed more than potential. He would need to know how to control it, and he would need to understand what that power could do—if anything. The more he learned about that kind of power, the more he understood why the mages had feared the dragon-bonded.
“That is but the smallest part of it,” Sashaak said.
“Then what’s the larger part of it?” Laric asked.
“Knowledge.”
With that, Sashaak stood and began to stretch even more, enormous wings nearly reaching the far walls. Laric watched the dragon as he continued to stretch his wings from one side to the other, and then Sashaak crawled through the cavern. When Laric called after him, Sashaak ignored him.
Malcolm strode over to Laric, a bit of an uncomfortable expression on his face, and he looked around for a long moment before he glanced over to where Sashaak had been. “Where’s that thing think it’s going?”
“That thing?” Rowan asked, finally seeming to shake some part of the unease from her.
Malcolm crossed his arms defensively. “Well, I don’t know the dragon’s name the way that Laric does, and to be honest, I don’t even know if the dragon is going to allow me to call it by its name, but where do you think it’s going?”
“I don’t know,” Laric said.
Sashaak crawled into the opening that led out of the cave. He worked his way up, using his wings like some sort of massive bird, and then once he reached the opening, he launched himself out into the night sky.
