But there was something so different about being here now, feeling it directly, and getting overwhelmed by that sensation.
He let out a whoop of excitement. Sashaak roared.
Laric wondered if they were too close to the town.
“Just take a look,” Sashaak said.
And through Sashaak’s eyes, Laric was aware of the town. From Sashaak’s vantage, it was little more than a speck in the distance. Nothing more than that.
“You’ve already gone so high?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sashaak said.
“How?”
“Potential.”
He looked through Sashaak’s eyes again, seeing not just the town but Dizarn’s dragon flying ahead of them, moving through the mountains.
As they flew, Laric tried to keep track of what Sashaak was doing, the way that he was angling, banking, and carving past the mountains, cresting peaks, darting through valleys, and moving faster than Laric could even imagine. At one point, he caught sight of a city, but he wasn’t sure what city it was, as he had never traveled this far. What he wouldn’t give to have Xavier and his knowledge to tell him what was going on here, but he didn’t have that.
As they continued north, Sashaak moved so fast, and so quickly, that everything was a blur of power and energy, and a blur of landscape beneath him, until it suddenly dropped off. The mountains fade. The land became flatter and flatter.
Sashaak slowed, and something about that change drew Laric’s attention in a way that other aspects of their journey had not. As he looked around, he tried to make out what was there, but struggled to.
“What is this?”
The ground was too far away for him to see much, even when borrowing from Sashaak’s eyesight.
“These are the borderlands,” Sashaak roared, his voice loud in Laric’s ears and within his mind.
“I thought that Xavier came here.”
Laric couldn’t even fathom how long of a journey that would take in a wagon caravan. Xavier had made it sound as if it were relatively quick, and that he traveled little more than a week or so before reaching Korthal. How long would it have taken that way? Although, perhaps going through mountain passes and weaving through known routes, he might’ve been able to travel much easier than what Laric and Sashaak had done.
“They came here, but they did not come here,” Sashaak said.
“So all of this…”
Laric’s voice trailed off as Sashaak started to descend, chasing after Dizarn’s dragon. Dizarn and his children were flying just off to the right of Sashaak, and they were slowly angling ever downward.
They paused only a couple hundred feet off the ground. Laric looked down, trying to make sense of what was here.
It wasn’t until he saw the first charred corpse of a dragon that he understood.
Everything within him went cold.
“This was part of the fighting,” he said.
“Yes,” Sashaak said.
“There isn’t much left. Just bones.”
“And there are fewer of those every day.”
“Why?”
“Some harvest them,” Sashaak said, as if he was just having a normal conversation rather than talking about a dead dragon. “They believe there is power in the bones, potential that is untapped.”
“Is there?” Laric asked.
“Possibly.”
That was odd, yet it did make a certain sort of sense, didn’t it?
“How?”
“You have seen how.”
They kept flying, slower now than they had been. It occurred to him that Sashaak had used considerable effort to keep up with Dizarn and his dragon. The speed they had been flying had been significant, and, Laric realized, they had been flying at a pace that he did not normally see Sashaak flying at. He wasn’t sure why Sashaak typically flew more slowly, except that he suspected that Sashaak had needed to fly at that pace so he would not draw attention.
They came across another dragon corpse. This one was in a state of decay, and they circled over it. Not far from the dragon was another, and not far from that were the ruins of a village. Maybe a small town. It was difficult to tell from this altitude, but the bones of the city were broken, the stone shattered and left strewn over the landscape.
He looked over to Dizarn, who was quiet.
“How many places are like this?” Laric asked.
“Many,” Sashaak answered.
