Page 73 of Dragon Outcast (Age of Fire 3)

His captors swooped down and landed gently.

Hairy, broad-backed hominids dropped jugs and tools and scattered as the avians alighted. A rise of black rock overlooked the garden.

The griffaran fluffed their wings and let out loud calls.

A dragon—a real dragon, huge and silver with black tips at his griff and crest and tail-line—stirred from where he’d been resting atop a small rock.

“High Captain, what brings you to the Imperial Resort without invitation?”

“I have a wounded young drake. He was involved in an egg raid. I’ll speak to the Tyr.”

Dragon snouts emerged from the rock. A head or two rose from holes. The Copper saw golden, and red, and pink, and even purple eyes looking at him. He heard whispered dragon voices.

“The Tyr rests.”

“Yark! He has always trusted my judgment in waking him.”

The silver dragon inclined his head sideways—rather like Auron when puzzled—but there seemed to be lassitude to the gesture, and disappeared into the rise. The Copper noted that it was the tallest prominence on the black rock; even the garden was above much of the rest of the top.

The others looked and sniffed at him with interest, not contempt. The smell of dragons, the odd sense of the vast space around while still being underground, the faint throb of so many heartbeats and breathing bodies and shifting claws and scales—it overwhelmed him, and he felt his throat go thick and his good eye blur.

The Copper’s eyes roved in wonder around the dome. What he’d taken to be the sun was just a glowing patch of light at the top of the dome. He suspected it was in fact sunlight being filtered through translucent material. But that wasn’t the only glow. Jagged streaks of orange light, brightening and fading and pulsing, flowed down the sides, adding a red-orange cast to the brighter light above.

A smallish, wide-bodied dragon, with scales that seemed deep red or purple depending on how the light struck, carrying seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…twenty-one horn-tips atop his crest, emerged from the rock. The horns grew up, sideways, down, as though interested in what was happening all around the dragon’s head. But for all the creature’s evident pride in the number of horns, patches of bare skin showed around his eyes, mouth, and the edges of his crest where scale had fallen away.

A pair of wide-shouldered, stooped-over hominids wearing white loincloths trailed behind, with brushes, scoops, and a basket.

“It’s you, Yarrick. They just said a griff captain or I would have hurried. It is the hour of white?”

Yarrick stepped in front of the Copper, cutting off his view of the Tyr.

“But one. We thought it best to let you sleep, Tyr,” the silver dragon said.

“Oh, bash it. I like getting to work early. You should have roused me. But I’m forgetting our visitors. What news from the water ring, brave Yarrick?”

“Another egg raid, Tyr. Well organized. They distracted us, poisoned the nest guardians. Sixteen eggs this time—it would have been the worst loss we’ve ever suffered. And then there’s this.”

He sidestepped from the Copper. The Copper felt the gaze of two slightly cloudy eyes the color of aging gold coin. He stared back defiantly. If this dragon was going to watch his own kind torn to bits for nest raiding without singeing so much as a feather—

“Really? That’s terrible,” the Tyr said.

Yarrick fluffed his wings. “This drake—still with egg-wet behind the griff, if I’m still fit to judge dragons—almost lost his gizzard to the demen while rescuing our eggs. But there were guts to spare in that one.”

Rescue?

It took the Copper a moment to get over the shock. He felt doubly fortunate that the fight with the demen turned out the way it did, even at the price of a stab in the firebladder. What if the griffaran had found him eating from a broken egg?

“What is he, some young relative of yours eager to prove himself, my Tyr? He shows the old FeHazathant spirit.”

“NoSohoth,” Tyr said, “is this some relative of mine? Why hasn’t he been presented to me? Such old scars on a young drake, too. He’s taken honors from three bitter fights, and I’m just looking at the front end of him.”

The silver dragon with the black griff tips lowered his head and looked at the Copper closely. “He’s no hatchling from the Imperial Resort, Tyr.”

Tyr glowered. “Hmmmm. Yes. Why does that not surprise me?”

“Let us sing of glories proudly won,” a golden drake said from one of the flower beds. The Copper saw a couple of bats flit under an overhanging rock behind him.

“Let’s keep our fool’s mouth shut for a change,” NoSohoth muttered.

---