Page 463 of Kingdoms of Night

He raced from the cabin and she was left alone with these horrible feelings. Tanis leaned to the side, vomit rising in her throat and pressing against the back of her tongue. She wouldn’t throw up. Not when Rowan was bringing back their visitor.

Rowan burst back into the cabin with another elf in tow.

Aster.

She’d made it back. Tanis felt the momentary rush of happiness before she almost threw up again. Gagging, she reached for what Aster had brought her.

“I’m sorry.” Rowan’s sister had tanned on her journey. Even her hair had lightened from time spent in the sun. “I didn’t know it would make you sick. She said it was important.”

Tanis didn’t care how she felt right now. Not when she could see the crystal that Aster had traveled across the sea to bring her. They weren’t meant to be removed from the earth. They shouldn’t ever be carried from one isle to another when there was so much magic embroiled within them. That crystal wasn’t supposed to ever be touched by an elf, let alone ripped up out of its home and brought here.

Her fingers slipped on the crystal when Aster first handed it to her. Sweat clung to the edges of the large pillar in large beads that trailed over the edges and dripped onto the ground.

The magic of the crystal overwhelmed her, swallowing her up before she even attempted to connect with the memory inside.

A dragon appeared in her mind’s eye. The crimson female had once been a magnificent fighter. She’d gone over to Umbra with the very first dragons. They’d all left intending to make connections with the people there. Clearly, their good intentions were not received well.

The crimson dragon paced in front of the crystal, almost as though the spell had been cast so that Tanis was right there in front of her. That is until Tanis realized the dragon stood in front of a giant sheet of ice. This memory was old. Older than she could have imagined.

As Tanis peered around it, testing the edges, she realized it had frayed a bit. There were no other memories in this crystal, which was rare enough, but because of that, the memory had bumped against the walls of the crystal. It was tearing itself apart.

“Tanis, I have to hope you get this,” the crimson dragon said. “You do not know me, but the elf here says that you are a Memory Keeper. She said she’d carry this crystal to you if I think the magic would hold true, but... I don’t know if this will survive the journey.”

She was surprised it had worked. Their crystals were never meant to travel, thus the sickness she had felt the moment Aster got close to her.

“The dragons of Umbra have fallen.”

The words captured Tanis’s focus again. The memory warped, listing to the side and then righting itself as though she were looking through a broken mirror.

She forced her mind to look through the memory as the magic of it weakened. She refused to let this dissipate the moment it reached her. Finally, the memory behaved, and that was when Tanis knew all was lost.

“I had a child,” the crimson dragon said. “All the others are dead, but he lives. And when I die, he will be the last of us. It is my hope that you will see this, that you are still alive through this horrible winter. That you will survive long enough to know that he will come to you. Someday, my son will find you. His name is Abraxas. I need you to take care of him, Tanis.”

The memory fractured at that moment. If there were more memories for her to see, they were gone.

She pulled herself out of the crystal’s magic and felt the last vestiges of her illness disappear as well. She could breathe again, and with that, the memory had disappeared. All she held in her hand was a rather pretty quartz pillar. That was all.

Aster bent onto her knees in front of Tanis. “What happened?”

“The child,” Tanis asked. “His name is Abraxas. Do you remember where he was when you left?”

“Safe in the mountains with his mother.” Aster looked at her brother as though he could confirm she had told the truth. “They were safe when I left. Did that change?”

Rowan answered for her. “The memory crystals cannot convey current messages. They aren’t a way to speak across great distances. They only contain memories, which I assume the crimson dragon was staring at herself while she spoke.”

“Indeed,” Tanis said. “And it was a grim warning.”

They really were gone. She had still clung to a shred of hope that maybe she couldn’t feel them because of the distance. They were so far away from her, she wouldn’t know if there were still dragons alive out there.

She was wrong. They had died, and now there was nothing left but a single crimson dragon in a land that wanted him dead. She questioned if he could ever find this isle. He’d never been here before. Or at least, she had to assume that he wouldn’t even have memories of this place. The crystals...

Aster picked up her hands and squeezed them. “His mother told me to tell you she’s left crystals behind. And that he’s been absorbing all the memories of other crimson dragons that she could find. There were some dragons who left those memories.”

“He’s too young,” she whispered. “He won’t understand them.”

“She said she had him absorb the memories. Not watch them.” Aster swallowed hard. “She didn’t say what that meant or what it would do to him, but it didn’t sound good to me.”

It wasn’t. Absorbing memories was cruel to the entirety of dragon kind. No one could ever see those memories again until...

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