“-. .-“

  I resettled inside my body with none of the grace I’d left. Spirit-borne farsight wasn’t quite astral projection, but the experience was largely similar save for the fact that your spirit just stays where it is, instead of leaving your body behind asleep and defenseless. Usually this meant your actions were harder to discern, especially just by looking at you, but this was an exception.

  Even so, the old dwarf next to me didn’t react to my return, even though as a shaman he surely must have sensed something, never mind the abrupt conclusion to my trip. He just gazed over the landscape, a deep frown set in his face.

  I looked where he was looking. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant view, deserts were all harsh and deathly, but it was different enough from everything on the way over as to be exotic. Nothing in particular justified looking at the landscape as if it personally offended him, though.

  Elder Strazi glanced at me. “This view, it may look like the most remote and captivating nature to you. I assure you, there is nothing natural about it save the agonizing slowness with which life tries and fails to return. When Deathwing betrayed all in the War of the Ancients, the Dragon Soul’s fury was as indiscriminate as it was concentrated on the ones he’d come to hate the most.”

  … This was not a dwarf, was it?

  “This place belonged to the Blue Flight. The ravine over yonder was called the Azure Creche. Back then, whelps were all spawned at the Broodlands in the Dragon Isles, under the protection of all the greatest elders from all five flights. But when they outgrew the nursery, each flight would claim their brood and take them away to their own homes and playgrounds. When a generation of blues had matured enough, Malygos and Syndragosa would come to the Lifeshrine, where I tended, to collect them and bring them here.”

  I turned my head to carefully keep the elderly dwarf in my sights, slowly unfolding my legs from beneath me.

  “Back then, before the war, long before the Dragon Isles were sealed away from time and memory, Lethlor Ravine wasn’t even a ravine. It was a tall, verdant plateau suffused with arcane energies beaming up into the sky through a hundred wellsprings tapped right into the Well of Eternity itself. When Deathwing turned on us at the height of the War…You can't imagine how awful that time was, the fear that surrounded us. The Sundering, the Betrayal of the black dragonflight, The Dragon Wars… You may call them something different, but I was there, and that's what I call it. All the dragonflights versus the black dragonflight.”

  I leaned forward and propped myself upright with my hands against the rock beneath. On the other end of camp, Blindi was also sitting up in his chair, listening first through Arrestor, and then through Geirrvif above us.

  “You would think it would be an easy fight, right? Four versus one after all, even with the Demon Soul. But the Blue Dragonflight was nearly completely eradicated in Neltharion's initial strike. So three to one, still great odds. Until you realize what it was like. Only the combatants were there to be destroyed in that first, wretched salvo. The rest of the Blue, the young, the children, the babies, he came here and killed later, after he fled the field of battle in his madness. With one sweep of the Demon Soul, the Azure Creche became the Canyon of Death, but even that wasn’t enough to finish the job properly. To finish the infanticide fell instead to his own children, after he left to hide in the Elemental Planes and writhe in the nightmare of his very existence.”

  A pox on dragons and their perfect shape changes that fool even me. “And you fought back?”

  “If you can even call it that. You only know Neltharion as Deathwing, and his brood as mad, evil beings. We knew them before they fell. This wasn't some unknown menace, this wasn't some great evil looming like the Legion was. These were our friends, our loved ones.”

  I remembered this story. “I can only imagine how awful that must have been.”

  “I don’t think you can. Although… If not you, then the ones you left behind in Alterac know what it’s like. Unlike them, there was no savior come down from heaven to put end to the madness and restore good and love to all our lives, violently or otherwise.”

  It did always sound far-fetched, that one beam cannon from Deathwing would have eradicated all the blues with just a few eggs left behind, regardless of how strong. Surely not all living dragons were fighting the Burning Legion, what good would whelps have done on that battlefield? Even if each flight was grouped up in that magical matrix to enhance the Demon Soul’s power, the point remained. Whelps would be so weak that they’d just burn up from the strength of the magic running through the greater matrix, not contributing anything.

  No, it could only have been a deliberate, systematic genocide in the aftermath.

  “It was awful, not knowing what was going on,” Strazi continued, and I knew what his real name was now. “Thinking there was something you could do to snap them out of it. They were my friends... and they were killing not just my brothers and sisters, but the babes of almost everyone I’d ever loved, ever known.”

  “How close were you, back then? Between different flights…”

  “I had many friends in the black dragonflight, some as close as clutch mates. Heh, growing up we used to play pranks on the elders. My best friend was of the black dragonflight, we intermingled a lot, back in those days... Not like now, where most flights keep to themselves. I remember one time we coated Alexstrasza's tail in honey while she slept and ... ah.... what does it matter?”

  Of course it matters. “Tell me about your friend.” And then I’ll tell you something for a change.

  “Isn't it funny? I can't remember her name. I can remember her face, I can remember how the light bounced off her beautiful scales, but I can't remember her name. I can remember the horror when I came home to find her standing over the bodies of my family, practically her family. Even after that I wandered and hounded her in almost a daze, unable to believe reality until I caught up to her here, right at the tail-ends of the massacre.”

  He didn’t say anything, for a time. “And then?” I prompted.

  “And then… Next thing I remember is the gut-wrenching despair as I plunged my claw into her throat. I remember the hate in her eyes as the light went out in them... I always wondered, if I had been a better friend, could I have prevented it? Did she not feel like she could come to me as she felt the corruption starting? Eventually, I convinced myself the answer was no, just so I could forget.”

  This part I didn’t remember.

  “But then, just mere moons ago, I find out that’s just me being once more a coward.” The disguised dragon turned wretchedly hollow eyes on me, a look I’d seen far too much these past few months in someone else’ face. “Fahrad the Butcher was cleansed. A miracle, but who says a miracle must be a one off? Only cowards too afraid to face their own deception of themselves. You redeemed the irredeemable and bestowed on him might and glory so bright as to blind the rest of us. Does that not mean this was possible all along, since the start? Does this not mean there was, all along, something we could have done? I could have done?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Maybe,” I agreed, because it was the truth. “But she didn't come to you.” It was what he himself would have said in a different future.

  Strazi looked away. “Maybe she felt she couldn't talk to me about it.”

  “Or maybe you’re only at fault for your failings and not anyone else’s,” I cut him off. “Maybe instead of thinking you didn’t do enough for her to be proud of you, maybe she was the one too ashamed to face you, if she ever had any moment of clarity.”

  The dwarf-shaped dragon looked on the verge of rage. Or tears. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, now.” He said with a thick, wavering voice. “You can’t know, and I suppose I can’t either. I don’t even know if all I remember is real, or just fantasies I dwelt on so much that I can’t tell the difference. If I was a better friend... if I had told her... Oh Titans, if I had told her how I felt... Could it have gone differently?... I loved her... And I can't remember her name.”

  “Distyia.”

  Strazi’s breath hitched, and he almost fell when he rounded on me, eyes glittering in the darkness.

  “She kept a journal.” I closed my eyes with fingers pressed against my forehead. “I see you, in the future. You’re back in the dragon isles, reading it. Reading to someone about… some event where you and her filled Malygos' lair with baby hornswogs.”

  I heard Strazi slapping a hand over his own mouth. “He hated that – I – I remember that…”

  “There is a place, on those islands,” I said, not entirely pretending to be having a vision, I had to ride the Light deep, deep into my ancient memories to retrieve this. “A great citadel made of obsidian. Inside, in the chamber… to the left of the entrance. There is a bookshelf. On that bookshelf there is a journal, partially destroyed. That’s the one.”

  I opened my eyes.

  Beside me, the dwarf who was really a dragon was covering his mouth and shedding tears.

  “Ten thousand years is a long time,” I murmured. “I won’t apologize for not being around back then. But I am sorry.”

  The dragon’s breath rattled with the effort of keeping his composure, but his tears only fell stronger for the effort. “Prophets,” the ancient said haltingly. Sobbed, almost, as he backed away from me and looked aside to escape my eyes. “So true. So merciless. Never the same way, even after ten thousand years. I – I can barely believe it's been that long since we left our home…”

  “Why did you?”

  The dragon laughed wetly. “To safeguard you mortals, we thought. We didn’t even do that in the end. We certainly aren’t doing it now.”

  I almost asked why he didn’t reveal himself or do something, or where he and his were when Grim Batol fell, but I didn’t get so far by being cruel.

  “I can almost hear the question you’re holding back,” Strazi rasped, backing away from me, towards the edge. “I don’t have a good answer for it. Maybe that itself is all the answer any of us need.”

  Without another word, the dwarf jumped off the edge.

  I stood up. I’d felt no urgency or alarm, and I knew why.

  From beyond the edge, a great flash of light preceded the ascend of an ancient red dragon, almost larger than Emerentius was at his worst.

  The air roared against his wings, and the ground shook as he latched onto the perch around me, his great forelimbs on each side of me while his great head lowered to pin me with one eye. Dragon faces weren’t as expressive as human ones, but it didn’t need to be in this case. I thought he’d say something, some parting words, but he didn’t. Even as the whole camp roused from their sleep in a panic and began to converge on us with hands full of weapons and faces full of shock, he watched me. Waiting for something.

  Maybe I can make Distyia proud of me, I recalled him say in that sad, twisted future. It was the one and only thing from that conversation he hadn’t told me some manner of variation of now, here. Maybe it was pithy or presumptuous of me to say so, but… “Don’t live your life for someone else.”

  “… I will speak well of you to the others.” Veritistrasz of the Red Dragonflight rose high on his long legs and spread his wings. “As for your Emerentius, I will tell my Queen that the name Deserving One was ably granted.”

  The dragon jumped, and with three strong beats of his great wings he was already outside the range of longbow and musket.

  Arrestor protected me from the wing buffet, but not the others who’d finally come to back me up against what they thought was an enemy. When they realized there was no danger, confusion set in, and dismay and betrayal when the wider implications began to percolate through everyone’s heads.

  Mine too.

  Perhaps I’ve overcompensated, I thought grimly. Instead of using the soulgaze too much, maybe I’m using it too little.

  “Elder Strazi!” Falstad blurted, stomping over to me in a fit. “He was a dragon?! Since when? Was ‘e always a dragon, or did ‘e replace – did we lose an elder at some point and didn’t notice?! He an’ Mastran – the only two old enough to have been there fer everythin’, is he a dragon too?!”

  “No, I’d have known when I healed him if that was the case.” However perfect a dragon’s shape change was, when it was so close, so deep, the Light would have reflected off his spirit’s true shape when I restored his eye. I think I’ll make Light health checkups mandatory. “How much older than Mastran was he, by your reckoning?”

  “We don’t know,” Kurdran said this time, exchanging a lost look with his cousin. “Some records and properties were destroyed or left behind when we lost the fight for Ironforge, we even lost entire bloodlines. Those two aren’t the only ones of that time that had to start from scratch, just the ones who lived the longest.”

  “Red dragons are benevolent,” I told them before anyone could start spiraling. “All but the black ones are. Some take the shape of mortal people and live among them, as them even, for entire lifetimes. Black dragons might kill someone to steal their identity, but not the others.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “If you don’t believe him, believe me,” Blindi called loudly from behind them, having waited for the stampede before approaching himself. He looked a strange mix of conflicted and vindicated at the same time, but didn’t lie any more than he ever did before. “You can call them indulgent, lazy, uninterested, with an overinflated sense of their own importance, even incompetent. But not malicious. Other than the blacks, at least, with the one exception.”

  Kurdran didn’t seem to know if he should swear or curse. “With all respect, High One, that doesn’t sound like any caretaker I’d ever trust – with anything!”

  “Hah!” Blindi scoffed. “I told my Father the same thing, but the Pantheon made their decision.”

  The dwarves trailed off uncomfortably.

  “Maybe it’s time you all learned about the real shaping of the world,” Blindi said reluctantly. “Unless you’d rather all get back to sleep?”

  His question set off a flood of denials and entreaties, each more earnest than the last.

  I made sure my appreciation was clear on my face when Blindi caught my eye on the way back to camp, accompanied by all the dwarves, elves, and most of my knights too after signaled them on it. It was an obvious distraction, what he’d offered to do, but a welcome one.

  I myself kept watch the rest of the night, not in the mood to sleep any more than everyone else. It would be a tired day tomorrow, but we could afford to stay in one place for a little while if we had to. It all came down to how much longer it took Emerentius to do his scan of the local geology.

  There was a possibility that someone or something might have spotted the large red dragon flying away, so I used farsight to scan the region on and off again through the night. Lethlor Ravine, and the Dusbowl and Dustwind Gulch too.

  I reached into my pocket and fingered the transmission stone, wondering if I should bite the bullet and contact Richard to catch up. I didn’t want to demand answers or give orders, I just wanted the briefest word that things were well.

  As always before, I decided against it. I told him I’d wait for him to do it first, so that’s what I’d do. As annoying as the divination blackout was, it wasn’t so complete anymore that I wouldn’t sense something if he or my family were at any risk back home.

  I made an aborted try at a connection, just to confirm the pair was still functional. There was still the possibility that his stone could be lost or misplaced, but it hadn’t been long enough for me to assume the worst yet.

  After Uldaman, I told myself. If there’s no sign before then, I’ll see what I can do from my end.