They slow as the power of the dampening aura hits them but don’t stop, their magic fading the closer they get.
But that I can feel it at all at this distance means they are priests working in unison, making a concerted effort to combat the effects of the Quiet—to pursue him?
Is the dragon being hunted?
In some ways, dragons and sages are not so different. We’re both born powerful, and everyone wants our power for themselves.
The difference is that sages have been made to serve others and spend our power, whereas dragons only serve themselves and hoard their power—
And the priesthood will always hunt them for that alone: for the raw magical power contained in their scales.
For priests to pursue the dragon this far into the Quiet, for him to be fleeing rather than fighting...
I don’t feel much in my current state. I can’t, not without breaking the magic that maintains the Quiet.
But a sense of foreboding creeps into my still bones.
The dragon stops outside the temple, because of course not even he can enter.
By the shape of the magic I sense, he’s in human form—the memory of his brilliant blue hair and icy eyes against his alabaster skin flashes through my mind, and I wonder if he still looks like that.
I’m wondering a lot, today.
The sense of his magic is also fainter than I’ve felt it in... No, it’s never been this low, not in my memory.
That’s why he’s running. He can’t fight the priests in this state.
If they make it up to the temple, even with them weakened, he still won’t be able to fight all of them, which he must realize.
It crashes through me at once with crystal clarity:
The dragon came here to die.
At the hands of priests.
And all at once, my long-banked wrath—my strength, my heart—crashes through me.
This dragon, intentionally or not, opened my mind, enabling me to save people when the priests of my time would have had me murder them en masse for their own gain.
This dragon has been the one constant in all the time I’ve been drifting, when I gave him nothing at all.
I did not hold the Quiet this long only for him to die for it.
Maybe Idon’tmatter anymore. Maybe I never did.
But maybe I can do one last thing with my life.
In this magical stasis, my body doesn’t move, which makesdoingmuch harder.
But wrath is powerful, especially when I can see the situation with perfect clarity:
The priests cannot have this dragon.
And I can stop them.
The mental kata that I’ve turned into a meditation is a hard habit to break, the habit of years.
And it takes more will to break habits than to start them.
