“Iknewyou worked for dragons,” Shiro grumbled.
“Not on purpose!” Marci cried, staring at Amelia in horror. “So none of it was real?”
“It wasallreal,” Amelia said. “Bob pointed you at the pins, but you were the one who knocked them down. You fought all the fights and made all the hard decisions that got you to where you are, which is why my brother picked you out of all the other potential mages. He knew you had the ambition and the guts to get where we needed you to be. I did, too. That’s why I gambled my life on you. Because of all the humans who had the potential to walk through that gate and become the first Merlin,youwere the only one who’d choose not to shut the magic off again.”
“Why did you even care?” Myron said, glowering. “Dragons make their own magic. You would have survived another drought just fine.”
“Surviving isn’t the same as thriving,” Amelia snapped, giving him a dirty look before turning back to Marci. “You’ve been to our original plane. You know our race’s tragedy better than any mortal and, sadly, most dragons. What you don’t know, though, is what we were before. Before we fled to this plane, the average lifespan of a dragon was thirteen thousand years. Thirteen thousand! Can you name a dragon even half that old today?”
“No,” Marci said. “But dragons don’t normally make their ages public, so that doesn’t mean—”
“It does in this case,” Amelia said. “The reason you can’t name one is because theyno longer exist. Estella and Svena are revered as ancient dragons, but by the old standard, they’re not even middle aged. If you look at our history, it’s easy to blame our lowered life expectancy on clan infighting. Bethesda certainly wasn’t the only dragon who killed her father for power. But dragons havealwaystried to kill their parents. The difference is that they’ve been uncommonly successful over the last ten thousand years. This isn’t because modern dragons are cleverer, stronger, or more ruthless than previous generations. It’s because old dragons like the Quetzalcoatl, who should have been unbeatably powerful, were weakened by livinghere.”
She dug her little claws into the stone. “This isn’t our world. We came here as refugees, and though we conquered, we never fully adapted. That’s no big deal for young dragons who’re still small enough to be supported entirely by their own flames, but once we achieve a certain size, fire alone won’t cut it. Like every other magical creature, including humans, we need native magic to buoy us up and keep us stable. We were able to limp along before the drought, because even though we couldn’t actually use the magic of this plane, we could still lean on it.”
“But then it vanished,” Marci said.
Amelia nodded. “We had nothing after that. Most dragons couldn’t even change into their true shape during the drought, and the ones that could manage couldn’t maintain it for more than a few minutes at a time. But even the trick of staying in our far less magically intensive human forms only really worked for the young and small. The truly large dragons, the ones who’d fled here from our original plane, they had to either go to sleep or find alternate sources of supplemental magic, like my grandfather and his Aztec blood sacrifices. Those who could left this plane entirely in search of greener pastures, but it was always just a crutch. Even the richest power of a foreign plane is no substitute for the magic of your home.”
Marci frowned, thinking her words through. As Bethesda’s daughter, Amelia had been born right before the drought hit, well after the dragons fled to this plane. But though she couldn’t have lived through their loss, she still sounded as if she were speaking from personal experience, and suddenly, Marci realized why.
“That’s why you were always on other planes, wasn’t it? You weren’t running from Bethesda. You got too big to stay.”
“Don’t write my mother off totally,” Amelia said. “Avoiding her was ahugepart of why I didn’t come home, but I was also nearing the edge of what this world could handle.”
She fluffed her smoldering feathers proudly. “You remember my impressive wingspan back on the beach? I might have mentioned this before, but thanks to the time dilation between planes, I’m alotolder than I should be. How much older is impossible to say since no one’s ever managed to make a reliable inter-planar calendar, but my best guess is I’m actually around four thousand, give or take a century.”
“That’s impossible,” Myron said. “That would make you the oldest dragon on Earth.”
“Now that the Three Sisters are dead, I am,” Amelia said matter-of-factly. “I’m older than Svena or Estella, and well big enough to have major problems with my magic. During the drought, I couldn’t be on this plane for more than a few days before I started feeling dangerously drained. Now that the magic’s back, I can manage a month, but it’s still unpleasant. This isn’t just a matter of my comfort, though. When the Merlins sealed the magic a thousand years ago, there were over a dozen ancient dragons remaining. By the time the seal broke, only the Three Sisters remained, and that was only because they’d slept through the whole thing. That’s alotof world-class dragons dropping dead in a relatively short period of time, and while none of them died as a direct result of the loss of magic, it’s no coincidence that they were all defeated by lesser dragons who should never have had a chance of beating them, including my charming mother. That weakness is why I’m here, because unless someone does something,that’sthe future of my species.”
Myron snorted. “Dying to your children?”
“Dying to a lot of things we shouldn’t,” Amelia said. “And while I know you don’t have a problem with that, this is far more serious than a few old dragons dying before their time. It’s the loss of our elders, the only dragons with the power and experience to keep the young idiots in line. Why do you think the clans have been so volatile since we got here? It’s not just because there was a land grab the moment we arrived. It’s because, by traditional dragon standards, we’re all children. We’re an entire race of young, hot-blooded fools, and when one of usdoessurvive long enough to learn some sense, there’s not enough magic around to sustain us, which causes us to reach for power we shouldn’t in order to survive.”
That didn’t sound good. “What kind of power?” Marci asked.
Amelia shrugged. “Anything we can find. Blood sacrifice was a popular choice. Even during the drought, there was power in blood, but it wasn’t exactly an efficient exchange. Even with an empire offering him sacrifices, the Quetzalcoatl still lost to Bethesda, and only part of that was due to her backstabbing the hell out of him. Personally, I’ve never cared for blood, so I made up the difference by Planeswalking to places that had magic in abundance. It worked well enough, but it was always a temporary fix, and it’s not like Planeswalking’s a common skill. Even Svena’s never mastered it, and she’s one of the greatest dragon mages in modern history, though if you ever tell her I said that, I’ll have to kill you. The point is, even if I could teach everyone how to Planeswalk, dimension-hopping in search of food is no way for most dragons to live. We’re stupidly territorial. We need land. We need ahome. And since we’re all already here, I’ve decided it’s time to properly move into this one.”
“How are you going to do that?” Myron said, trying and failing to hide his obvious curiosity behind a wall of academic disdain. “Dragons operate on a fundamentally different magical system. You can’t just ‘move into’ our plane.”
“But we already have,” Amelia said, looking up at Marci. “Do you remember how nice your death was? How big and spacious and well furnished? Whose memories built that for you?”
“Julius’s,” Marci said. “But—”
“Exactly,” Amelia snapped. “Julius, adragon. By everything we know about magic, his memories shouldn’t have done squat because, as Captain Curmudgeon here just reminded us, dragons aren’t part of this world’s magical mojo. Or, at least, we weren’t ten thousand years ago. But that separation must be starting to blur, because as you and I both saw, Julius’s memories mattered. And if a dragon’s memories can help build a human death, what else can we do? The question is no longer ‘is integration possible?’ It’s howmuchintegration has already occurred, and how much further can we take it?”
By the time she finished, Marci’s mind was racing. “It’s absolutely possible,” she said excitedly. “Magic is a natural system, and natural systems change and evolve when pushed.”
“Not this much,” Myron said, glaring at both of them. “This whole theory is ridiculous. Dragons have only been here for ten thousand years. That’s nothing on an evolutionary time scale, especially given how slowly the dragon population turns over. There can’t possibly have been any meaningful change in such a small period of time.”
“But we’ve already seen it,” Marci argued. “Amelia and I were both inside the death Julius shaped for me with his memories. How would that be possible if this isn’t happening?”
“Are you sure it was him?” Myron countered. “It’s no secret you were infatuated with your dragon master. Do you have any proof that it was his memories doing this and not your own wishful thinking?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “Because I wasdead, and as mydeath spirithas informed me, human deaths are holes dug into the floor of the Sea of Magic by the memories of theliving. None of my old friends from Nevada even knew I was in the DFZ, much less knew what kind of house I lived in. Julius is the only one those memories could have come from. Plus, the whole reason I was trapped there to begin with was because I was too remembered for the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead to find me. Where were those memories coming from if not from dragons?”
“They were from dragons,” Ghost confirmed. “Memories are memories no matter which head contains them. A mage who is remembered by a dragon cannot be said to be forgotten.”
