Even up here, I found myself thinking. Even up here on what feels life the roof of the world – life still finds a place to grow. My heart was caught by the unique beauty of this place that was so very different from the meditative, expansive beauty of the Plains, or the rich, verdant greens of the Middle Kingdoms.
“Ahoy!” Montfre shouted – his voice distant since he was the furthest away from me – as he pointed at something he had spotted between the arms of the mountains.
“I see it, too!” Tamin called as I turned and peered.
“Eldest Sister,” Ymmen said, just as my own eyes alighted on what excited the others so much.
There, between the complicated arms of two mountains and such an uptight jangle of cliffs, gorges, and boulder fields, was a sort of hollow.
And in that hollow was an almost perfect circle of deepest black. It had to be it. It had to be the Circle of Grom.
“It looks…deep,” Abioye muttered a little warily a few feet away from where we all stood, crouched, or perched on one of the last cliff ledges before the deep pit itself.
“It looks bottomless,” Montfre clarified a little, and even he sounded a little cowed by the sheer enormity of this place.
The wind was stilled where we stood, but we could clearly see the sparkling drifts of snow like the baubles of Kings Torvald’s courtiers being thrown across the snowfields and rocky arms of the opposite mountains to us. But below us all, there sat this great big, well – hole.
I could see the rock wall of the Circle of Grom clearly, so in that way, I knew that it wasn’t a completely unnatural feature – but those gray rock walls, silvered by frost, stretched down and down and farther down still, until even the light appeared to give up, and for the pit to become just an inky black spot. I had no words for how deep it looked – and I half-expected, that were I to fly down through it on the back of Ymmen, we would travel out of all time and memory, like those dragons that apparently chose to take the Western Tracks…
But the Circle of Grom was wide, too – and I reckoned that you could easily fit five or more dragons the size of even the great Ymmen flying, wingtip to wingtip – across its diameter.
Even apart from the sheer vastness of it – there was something even stranger about this place. It looked clearly to be a natural feature, with its walls of riven and humped rock in natural striation patterns – and yet those walls shot straight downwards – or seemed to, from our vantage point on the ledge.
“What sort of well, or spring, or sinkhole does that?” I murmured to myself, and felt a stirring of dragon against my own mind.
“A star does,” Ymmen said enigmatically.
What? I thought towards him, turning as I did so to find his head half-cocking, turning one great gold-red eye towards me. It sparkled fiercely in this austere, hard light.
“You know that the stars sometimes move quickly, shooting with long tails across the heavens?” Ymmen said.
I nodded. The Daza had a story that they were the flights of distant, far dragon-spirits, breathing fire as they flew on their fast courses around the world, seeking for a place to be born into flesh and bone and scale.
“And sometimes the stars fall too close. They are dislodged from their circuits and circles, and even fall to the ground,” Ymmen said. “There is a dragon-song—” (and in my mind, I understood that notion of ‘dragon-song’ as similar to the notion of a ‘teaching story’ that we Daza told, but also ‘memory’ or ‘myth’ or, bizarrely; ‘family’) “—that tells that this place is where one of the stars fell from the heavens, straight down to the ground. It is one of the oldest dragon songs, and is a part of the song called the Cycle of Becoming.”
“The what?” I stuttered out loud. I knew that the dragons had their own histories, their memories, their families, and even their societies – of a fierce, dragon sort – but not that they had legends.
“The Cycle of Becoming. The oldest song.” A shadow passed over the great dragon’s mind as he spoke. “It is broken. Only fragments remain.”
“Maybe Fargal knows it,” I thought, remembering that this dragon I had come to see was the sister to Zaxx the Golden, Zaxx the Tyrant, and she was supposed to be one of the eldest of dragons. But there was another, wasn’t there? I thought. The dragon that had been guarding the Stone Crown itself. “What about Elder Brother?” I asked. Hadn’t Ymmen himself said that the behemoth had been from one of the First Broods of all dragon-kind?
“Perhaps. But I cannot hear Elder Brother’s song. I cannot sense where he is,” Ymmen said, falling silent for a moment before adding, “The songs of the First Brood are like that, or so us younger dragons believe. Their songs are powerful and old, but also strange to our ears. Almost as if they speak with a language that the rest of us have forgotten.”
I felt the great dragon’s sadness at this loss to his heritage, and my heart ached for him. It seemed that dragons had their own forms of tragedies and disasters – and their pains were deeply felt in a way that few, if any, humans could understand.
“Come.”
I gasped as a new voice washed up from the edges of my flame-tinged mind. Fargal, I thought, looking across to the great black dragon to see that he was regarding me with one, giant golden red eye.
“Narissea? What is it?” It was Abioye. He must have seen some expression of nervousness on my face, and he shivered a little as he turned to me in his old and once-fine tattered cloak
“Come to me, child of the wind…” The words of the ancient dragon grew only stronger in my mind. I didn’t know if it was because I now could recognize that voice as Fargal’s, or whether it was that, so close to her lair, her mind was that much stronger. I could sense it radiating that dragonish heat underneath everything that I was and thought, and I quailed at how powerful she was.
“What if she is angry? What if she wants the Stone Crown for herself?” I whispered to Abioye, who nodded gravely that he understood precisely who I was talking about.
“Then we will face that, too.” Abioye reached out his gloved hand to mine, our fingers clasping together. Once again, the beast of my heart thudded…
“Come to me, child of the wind!” But the voice of the most ancient dragon was growing evermore insistent. I knew that I could not deny her – and with that knowledge came the awareness that Fargal did not want to speak with any other, save me and Ymmen.
“No – I…” I let go of Abioye’s hand, and saw the look of embarrassed hurt across his features. “I have to do this alone, Abioye—” I was saying, as I turned towards Ymmen, already shaking the layers of frost from his leathery wings.
“Nari, no! It’s too dangerous!” Abioye burst out, and scuffled his boots in the snow – but Ymmen let out a low, warning growl for any who would try to stop us. I knew that he wasn’t being threatening or menacing, and that there was no malice in his thoughts – but his point was taken by the lordling, who lowered his head, still frowning heavily.
“Fargal wants to see me, and I have the Stone Crown,” I explained as best as I could as I reached out to the warm scales of Ymmen’s leg and pulled myself up onto his shoulder. “I will try to explain to her that we need her help to fight Inyene, and that I hope to put right the evils that the Old High Queen Delia started – but if she decides to destroy this Crown on my head, and me with it – then it is a threat that I have to face, too.” I said, not even knowing that was how I felt until I had said it.