First: The Flight Back

Viridis Company

Dragon Cliff

It was cool but not cold, the wind running quietly up the northern end of the bay and its long turn around the border of Viridis Company. The dragon flight hunted and nested in the mountains behind where they stood. It had taken them almost a year to find each other again, and over a month to come to this place together. There was comfort in that. “They know where they're going,” said Kenley Dirac to her husband as they watched the dragons watching them in return. "They'll find him." Finding him didn't mean they could bring him back with them. "Unless he's alone they won't even try to speak to him. Simply showing themselves will accomplish nothing, Kenley, and you know it."

"We'll keep trying." He glanced at what remained of his creation as it burned. He still hoped at least one of his daughters would understand what he'd left of his work, as incomplete as he was afraid it was. It had been a long and darkening time but he still had some hope or he wouldn't be standing here in a strange world watching strange animals blow hot smoke through their mouths. "We have another option, much harder I know but we'll have to take it if this doesn't work," he reminded her gently. He had to admit it had been hard at first to speak with the same love he'd given her since they were married, love he believed she still gave him despite the change. The change was impossible to get around though. She didn't answer.

The first and largest of the two dragons, the female, rose up into the empty air in one strike of bronze wings and a cloud of pale smoke. The other waited until she cleared the space, and in that quiet moment the woman called out, “Find him. Find him and bring him here.”

“Yes,” breathed the dragon, "we will," and took one long clawed step toward the edge.

The dragons did not consider any of this particularly sensible. They were not searching for something that was hiding or something that they intended to kill. It was, for them, a gentle and strange task.

At the edge of the meadow Marek and Robanna stood and waited by the saddled white dragon's side. The boy called out, “Fast flight, fast return.”

Drake, the Alcaide of Viridis, and Davel, the manager of Bluehill Company, both stood back and watched, as desperate as he was. They had flown the dragons up to the bluff in this crazy effort to basically kidnap the damned Lombardo boy. "Thank you," he told them. Davel nodded. He was the easier of the two to work with, and he knew it. "We go after the other one if they don't find him," Drake Alcaide said flatly. "I won't try this kind of thing again. Pirene's man will be in Alhazen tomorrow. I'd like that to be the last time." Pirene controlled the coalition of the companies and made their lives miserable as a result, and they'd tried to topple them before without success, but there was more. These people had been fighting something much darker. What Pirene wanted, and what they were willing to do to get it, he had only to look at what they'd left of his wife to see.

The second dragon took the air above the deep cold water, and, like the first, left smoke like a gift. The essence Luca had created exploded, white as the smoke and as ephemeral. It wouldn’t keep its light long but even invisible it would serve as dragons' beacon home. It was almost the last of what he'd made and there would be no more.

Kenley Dirac turned and looked at her husband.  She'd said they would find what they needed.  She'd said they would find it and they would destroy an enemy and then they would go home.

Or, at least, he would go.  He saw no way Kenley could ever go home again.

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Note: Many thanks to Esotheria-Sims for the dragons and the Blackbird.