Page 45 of Dragon Fight

A lie, obviously, she replied.But a convenient one. In the Battle of the Two Queens, Inara managed to deploy dragon against dragon in a bloody and terrible fight, but it was one neither side could win. She didn’t have the number of dragons your king has at his back now, and we…

She sighed.

We could’ve obliterated all of them right there and then. There were far more dragons on our side than Inara’s but… It would’ve meant wholesale slaughter of our own kind. We misunderstood Inara’s intent. We thought it was as the name of the battle suggested, a fight between queens over territory. The humans were spreading like fleas on a dog, taking more and more land and seeking to drive us away, severing the connection between our peoples in their greed. We thought we would send a queen to fight Inara’s dragon, Kaida, and that once our superiority had been asserted Inara would curtail her ambitions.

None of what Cynane said was written in any of our history books. Inara had become little more than a footnote since the Nithians had overturned the rule of queens. We only learned about the Battle of the Two Queens because it marked the end of wild dragonkind.

Or so we had thought.

Which made me think of the ruins we’d visited and the bas relief sculptures on the walls there. They depicted a very different world, one where humans and dragons—

Lived together in harmony, Glimmer finished for me, glancing my way.The way we were always supposed to be. Now humans see us as naught but weapons, raised to support whoever sits on that damn throne, with no more input than a cow might when a farmer milks it.

Inara deployed the dragons she had raised especially to attack us,Cynane continued. Dragons that should’ve joined us at Dragon Home when they were still in the egg. Till then, each human queen kept the queen dragon that bonded with her, as a symbol of her position, but all of the other eggs that were born when the golden queen rose to mate with wild males were to be returned to us for proper raising.

The dragon blinked and I saw themuscles around her empty eye socket move to do the same.

Instead, the dragons that Inara kept back became her soldiers.

“That was the start of the Royal Riders,” Flynn said, in a hushed tone.

It was to be the start of dragons being pitted against dragons, Cynane corrected.A fight not for territory but a war for the entirety of Nevermere.Inara was facing her own threats to her dominance from her people. They wanted to take more and more of the land for themselves, not understanding that they were clearing trees and creating farms on dragon territory.

“But people died,” Soren said. “They were killed trying to maintain their farms and then there was the famine that came from so many crops being torched.”

We made clear to whom the land belonged, Cynane said firmly.But the humans would not accept this. Many did die, because they persisted despite our warnings. This was never the way we wanted things to be. When the first human woman bonded with a queen dragon, this wasn’t the kind of life they had planned.

I shrank back as Cynane seemed to swell in size, her scales starting to glow, seeming to grow larger and larger as she spoke of what had been.

We were to live in harmony, sharing the bounties of Nevermere, but humans are rarely satisfied with that. Dragons came to Nevermere to escape the grasping ambitions of humans, to preserve the natural balance and we had destroyed every other ship, every other human that landed on our shores.

I saw it again, the vision Glimmer had shared with me, of a bedraggled party of humans staggering out of their boat and onto a rocky beach covered in small dragonstones. Of dragons rushing out to meet the threat and a woman stepping forward from the other people, thrusting out a hand as if that would be enough to stop the great beasts.

And it had been.

The golden queen stopping in her tracks, feeling the mind of the woman touching hers and then…

Once it became clear that the war could not be won without heavy losses on both sides, we struck a deal with Inara and her dragon soldiers,Cynane said finally,and that’s where your twisted stories come from.The human queen would relinquish all rights to the northern lands, keep her people out of it and we would… We would withdraw from our hereditary territories, pull back from the gentle lands thick with deer and keep to the rocky tors and mountains. But every human queen that came after, and then the kings, when the Nithians rose to power, would come here and be presented to the dragon enclave.

Her golden eye settled on Draven.

And if deemed worthy, they would be gifted a dragon egg of their own. We gave Draven the egg that would become the dragon, Darkspire, new blood for the Nithians’ breeding program. One they could use to support their claim to the throne.

And produce yet more dragons to maintain their hold over the country, I thought darkly.

But the presence of a seer? Any dragonling that resists the pull of human consciousness, that maintains her own presence of mind in the shell is to be surrendered to us.

“I know, Cynane, and so did my brother. We tried—” Draven said to the queen.

Excuses, human intrigues mean little to us. Her tone was withering, ice-cold.Your petty disputes are not worthy of our attention.

“Perhaps this one might be of interest,” Draven replied. “I didn’t speak of it before because…” He sighed. “Because I feared your response, but…”

This was another of the rare moments when Draven’s mask fell. We saw not a prince, but just a man, a weary, beaten-down man standing before us. Darkspire moved closer, nudging his rider with his massive head and Draven scratched at ‘Spire’s muzzle in response.

“My mother, the queen, seeks to upset the current balance of power further. She plans to tear my father from the throne, using the dragons we have, and then claim it for herself or my uncle, putting their duchy in control of all others. Civil war will break out. And it will be fought using dragons.”

Cynane raised her head up, her eye unblinking as she stared at Draven.

---