The Grand Elder's voice had changed entirely.
What had spent two days performing the frail, whistling rasp of a dying man was gone. What replaced it was something that belonged to a different order of creature — deep and resonant, a cello note drawn long at the base of the chest, vibrating through the stone of the terrace in a way Selene felt more in her ribs than her ears.
He sat tall. The weight of decades had slid from his spine like a cloak finally set down.
"Dragons live for centuries," he began. "Rulers of the sky — powerful beyond the measure of almost any living thing. And yet our numbers dropped. Slowly at first, and then all at once. War. Sickness. Greed — our own, and others'."
The air around him carried a faint heat haze, and beneath it a scent like dry cedar and old lightning. The brazier's flames tilted toward him as he spoke, as though the fire recognized something kin.
"In the age of Magic and Beasts and Kings, dragons soared above it all. Some fought beside men, others against them. A single dragon could turn the tide of a war before the second day. But as our numbers thinned, we became more valuable to those who would use us — which made us more hunted, which made us fewer still. A cycle without mercy."
His gaze drifted to the flames and stayed there. The gold of his eyes caught the firelight and gave it back richer.
"When the mages rose, they wanted our fire for their forges. Our power to sharpen their workings. Our very bones to serve as anchors for their ambition. The wars they drew us into bled our kind dry. And in those wars, many of us finally saw the truth we had been too proud, or too comfortable, to name." His tone darkened, turned heavy and somber. "We were being used. Tools for human glory. Weapons to be aimed, not beings to be honored."
He leaned forward, the shadows finding the deep lines of his face. "Humans are remarkable creatures. Fragile, short-lived, driven by hungers they can barely name — and yet capable of toppling mountains given enough time and desperation. When they could not master the mages' power, they dismantled it. When the last great mage-towers fell, humanity had done what no army of dragons had managed: brought the most powerful magical order in the world to its knees." A faint, humorless sound — not quite a laugh. "The weakest beings.breakable. And they destroyed beings far stronger than them anyway."
Shawn shifted slightly at that—but said nothing.
He straightened, something bleak settling across his features. ""When they could not master magic, they destroyed it.Just like that the mages numbers dwindled, theb they turned their eyes to us."
The Elder's hands tightened on his staff. The old wood creaked under the pressure.
"Dragons fell from the sky like shooting stars. Kin were slain for trophies. Crowns were forged in our dying fire. Poets wrote songs about it." His voice carried no bitterness — only the flatness of something that has been grieved past the point of anger.
The terrace fell into a silence that felt structural. Even Rory had stopped moving. Outside, the mountain wind seemed to pause with them.
"When the killing finally ended, eight of us remained. Eight, from thousands."
The wind outside seemed to still.
"Eight," Lyra repeated quietly.
The Elder nodded.
"Eight, from thousands."
Lyra's voice came quiet but deliberate — the voice of a commander finding the load-bearing wall of a story. "And the King of Avalon?"
A small, sad smile crossed the Elder's lips — the first genuinely soft expression they had seen from him.
"Kind," he said. "Not human, not entirely. His bloodline carried the grace of the elves, a lineage old enough to remember what balance felt like. He offered sanctuary to those who still breathed — to all creatures whose magic was dwindling in a world that had decided iron was the only honest currency." A pause. "In Avalon, we found peace.For a time."
He looked up, eyes reflecting the torchlight like molten gold. "Our creator — Ravi, the Sun God — took pity on what remained of us. He granted us the gift of change: the ability to take human form, to walk unseen among those who had hunted us. Thus began the Dragonian line. Dragons who lived as men and women. A bloodline blended with the very people we had once feared and fought — a new lineage, carrying the flame within."
---
Selene tilted her head, her pale hair catching the firelight. "But you said your kind began to fall sick."
"Yes." The Elder's voice softened into something almost private. "Ancient blood weakens when it grows stagnant. Magic was dying in the world — not quickly, not dramatically, just slowly draining away like water from a cracked vessel. Those of us who carried the pure blood, born before the great wars, began to fade one by one. Our bodies sickened. Our fire dimmed to embers and then to warmth and then to almost nothing." A pause. "No one could find the cause.There was...no cure"
He let that sit, then continued.
"Until one day, in the ruins of Oakhart, we found a book. A remnant of the mages' lost libraries, half-eaten by time. Within those moldering pages lay a single clue — a direction, really, more than an answer." He paused. "The Moon Weavers."
Lyra's eyes sharpened. "The book in Oakhart's library. The one with the broken spine and the torn pages. That was you."
The Elder nodded once — slow, solemn.
Lyra and Selene looked at each other. That incomplete tome, the mystery of its missing leaves — it had nagged at them since Oakhart. The answer had been sitting on this mountain the whole time.
"Finding the Weavers was like chasing a whisper inside a hurricane," the Elder continued. "Decades passed. We lost more of our kind. Eight became five. Five became four: Allen, Levina, Ira, and myself. And when things seemed at their worst—" a pause, weighted "—they became worse still. Our descendants, the mixed-blood Dragonians, even with human blood they began to sicken as well. The blood was failing across the entire lineage."
He drew a slow breath.
"And then, just when hope had nearly exhausted itself — we found her, rather she found us"
Selene leaned forward. Her voice came out barely above a whisper. "Mina."
"Yes." The warmth that moved through the Elder's expression was not performed. It was the warmth of a memory that still costs something to touch. "She came to us searching. She said she was looking for others of her kind, but she could not remember where they had gone. Her memories had been sealed — by what power, she did not know. She remembered only fragments. Her healing. Her light." He paused. "A home she could no longer find."
Elise spoke without looking up — quiet, precise. "She didn't remember where she was from. Just like Selene."
Selene's breath caught.
Shawn's brow furrowed. "Both of them amnesiac. Both Moon Weavers. That's not coincidence."
No one disagreed.
"She stayed with us," the Elder continued. "She became our salvation — healing our descendants, stabilizing the pure-bloods. She save our children, gave our kind hope.In return, we promised to help her find her people. Months passed. We searched together." He slowed, reaching for something imprecise in his memory. "One day, Levina, Ira, and Mina went out together. They found an object — I am not certain what it was. A bracelet,no a pendant. Something with a crystal in it. Whatever it was, it unlocked something in Mina. She said she remembered — finally, — where the other Weavers were hidden."
Lyra stepped forward. "Where?"
"The Forbidden Valley."
The words landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
Selene's hand went to her chest. "We've been there. We were just there."
"Yes," the Elder said. "But Alas, it seem that her memory had not fully recovered all. So she failed to pinpoint where And when they returned from it, they were not alone. They had been followed — by figures bearing the insignia of the Star." His voice hardened. "Mages. What remained of them."
Lyra's eyes narrowed. "Sahir's people."
He nodded gravely. "They returned bruised and barely ahead of pursuit, fighting every step back to the mountain's edge. Even Mina had been hurt — and as you may know, a Moon Weaver's gift does not reach her own wounds. She heals as any mortal does. She was vulnerable."
Lyra's gaze moved briefly to Selene — thinking, Selene knew, of the slow grinding recovery from wounds that should have closed in hours. She looked away.
"The mages were harvesting essence," the Elder continued. "This is what Allen told us: the mages had been capturing creatures across the valley, drawing out their life force, their magic, their fundamental nature — refining no infusing it into those orange stones. Anchors, they called them. Using them to restore what the wars had taken. And Mina's essence — Moon Weaver light — was particularly valuable to them."
"So the orange they use for their magic" Lyra said frowning "a rare stone they tried to mine in Rory's village"
"-and the blue one is for control"
The Elder nods his head "To control beast and beings to their command"
A pause. His voice thinned slightly, the edge of something old and guilty moving beneath it.
"After Mina recovered, she decided to leave. She believed her presence was pulling the mages toward us. Levina chose to go with her. We did not argue." His jaw tightened. "The mages overwhelmed us with their magics."
He stopped. Looked at Bryce.
The golden light in his eyes went soft — the specific sorrow of a witness who knows they chose inaction when action was still possible.
"They came for us regardless," he said. "The mages arrived with beasts a and a magic we had not anticipated. Ira and Allen fought. I—" He stopped again. The silence lasted longer this time. "I hid. I told myself it was strategy. That my death would help no one." He said it the way someone says a thing they have rehearsed many times without it ever becoming easier. "Ira and Allen were taken. Several of our people were taken. And I survived by doing nothing."
He held Bryce's gaze steadily, not flinching from whatever he found there.
"Weeks later, you came back alone. You were barely conscious — barely yourself. Before you lost the last of your coherence, you delivered a message from Ira. You told me the mages were using the Orange Anchors to drain us. And you carried this."
He rose from his place, moved with the deliberate care of a large man in a confined space, and returned a moment later with a small leather pouch. He loosened the cord and set it on the stone between them.
Inside: a blue crystal, chipped at one edge, still faintly luminous with a cold, borrowed light.
"That's the same as the stones from the village," Rory said, leaning in.
Selene reached for the pouch — and stopped.
Nestled against the blue crystal, nearly hidden in the lining: a shard of yellow crystal, pale and irregular, no larger than a thumbnail. She hadn't noticed it. But now she could see nothing else.
Selene picked it up.
The world tilted.
---
The smell arrived first: crushed ferns and damp earth, the green heaviness of deep undergrowth. Then sound — rapid breathing, her own and someone else's. They were running. People were shouting. It was a war. Then hands on her shoulders, gripping hard, with the force of someone who has made a decision and is running out of time.
A boy. His face was blurred at the edges, the way faces in recovered memory sometimes are — present in feeling, absent in detail. But she could feel him entirely: the warmth of him, the terror moving through his hands, the particular desperation of someone who loves you and has chosen something they cannot take back.
"Stay here." His voice was shaking. "No one must ever know where we came from. Do you understand me? You have to hide — right now—"
He pushed her backward into thick brush. Branches caught at her hair and arms. Through the leaves she saw him reach forward and take something from around her neck — felt the chain snap cold against her skin — the yellow stone gleam as he grip it.
He stood there for a moment, looking at her through the leaves.
"I suppose this is goodbye." His voice broke on the last word. He pushed forward through the brush and wrapped his arms around her so tightly she felt his heartbeat against her collarbone, felt the small convulsion of a sob he was trying to hold back.
Then, barely a sound at all:
"Sister."
The cold came without warning. Then a severe headache came.
Then nothing.
---
Selene came back to herself gasping, one hand braced on the stone floor, the yellow shard still clutched in her fingers. She was shaking. Her skin had gone the color of ash.
Lyra's hand landed on her shoulder — warm, immediate, certain. "Selene."
Selene pressed her free hand over her eyes. She reached for the image — the boy's face — and it slipped sideways, dissolving the moment she touched it, the way dreams go in the first seconds of waking.
"Someone was there," she said, voice unsteady. "He called me—" She stopped. Swallowed. "He called me sister. He hid me. He took something from my neck, and then—" She looked at the shard in her palm. "I can't find his face."
Silence filled the room.
Then the Elder, very quietly: "The yellow crystal."
Selene looked up at him.
Something had shifted in his expression — not surprise, but the particular recognition of a suspected thing confirmed. "It is the same type as the one Levina brought to Mina," he said. "The object that returned her memory." He looked at the shard in Selene's hand. "Mina held it and wept. She said she finally remembered. That how she remembered the forbidden valley." He paused. "I do not know where Levina found it. But the connection is not accidental."
Selene closed her fingers around the shard. It was warmer than stone had any right to be.
"Is Mina still out there?" she asked. Her voice was very steady for someone still trembling. "Do you know where she is?"
The torches guttered in a sudden draft. The Elder's shadow moved against the wall — lengthening, the shape of it less human than the man casting it.
"Yes," he said.
The word landed in the room like the first stone of an avalanche.
---
The Eye in the Storm
Far above the terrace, where the wind screamed against the naked peaks and the mist came in horizontal off the mountain face, the ash-robed mage stood perfectly still.
The raven returned from the dark and settled on his outstretched arm with a sharp, guttural croak. Sahir unfastened the note from its leg, but his eyes never left the village below. He did not need the report. He could feel it now — a sudden, violent flare of draconic heat blooming up from the terrace, and beneath it, steadier and stranger, the silver pulse of a Moon Weaver's light coming into focus. Like a distant star finally resolving from blur into something precise and locatable.
The mask had been dropped.
"The old lizard has finally decided to show his teeth," Sahir said quietly. His fingers moved to the blue stone at his throat — a reflex, the way a man presses a wound to check whether it has closed. The gem pulsed beneath his fingertips with a cold, sickly luminescence, the light of something alive that had been reduced to fuel. The air immediately around it tasted faintly of rot. "A pity. Teeth can be pulled."
He turned his gaze to the ridge behind him. They had been arriving through the night — hooded figures emerging from the treeline in ones and twos, their blue stones catching the dark and throwing back synchronized pulses of cold light. A constellation of stolen fire spreading itself along the mountain's edge, patient and silent.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
"Prepare the anchors," he said. The wind took the words and carried them. "Secure the Moon Weaver and the dragon. What else we find, we use." A pause. He lifted his gloved hands with an orange crystal and a flame appeared then flick it again it disappeared. "Our kind has waited long enough."
The figures on the ridge moved without sound.
The mountain held its breath