One Good Dragon Deserves Another

by Rachel Aaron

  “So my future’s in there, too?” Marci said, her eyes huge.

  “A small portion,” the dragon replied. “But not bad, for a mortal.”

  “What about our pasts?” Julius asked. “Are those here, too?”

  Dragon Sees the Beginning smirked. “They are, but they were so minuscule, I’m afraid I already consumed them so we would be able to communicate. An unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of coming to this place at such a young age.”

  “You ate our pasts?” Marci squeaked. “How does that work? And what about the future? Do you eat that, too?”

  The dragon looked insulted. “Of course not. The past of all dragons and their servants is mine by right of my station, not to mention my only fuel in this empty place. The future, however, belongs to my brother, Dragon Sees Eternity, but he left here long ago to live with the dragons who survived the collapse in their new home.”

  “So there’s another one of you?” Marci asked, getting excited. “Like, on Earth?”

  “Is that not what I just said?” the dragon rumbled, shaking its huge head. “We were created to be a pair, but there’s not much for a guardian of the future to do in a world that no longer has one. So he left, and now it’s just me.”

  Julius couldn’t believe there could possibly be a dragon this big on Earth without everyone knowing. But interesting as all this was, it wasn’t why they were here. “I’m sorry you lost your brother,” he said as tactfully as he could. “But if he’s in charge of the future, then maybe he’s the one we need to talk to? You see, we came here because another dragon, a seer named Estella, is using chains like these,” he pointed at the tangled chains that made up the ground, “to control several members of my clan. I need to find a way to break them.”

  “You don’t need my brother for that,” Dragon Sees the Beginning huffed. “What you ask is impossible. Chains from this place can never be broken.”

  Julius scowled. That couldn’t be right. If Estella’s chains of control were unbreakable, then why were they here? Why had Bob even mentioned this place? Before he could open his mouth to ask, though, the giant dragon lowered his head down in front of them.

  “It seems you are in need of a lesson from history,” it said, its voice deeply pleased. “Do you know how the future got chained in the first place?”

  Julius shook his head, and the dragon grinned wide, launching gleefully into the story like it had just been waiting for this chance. “Ages ago, back when this was a proper plane, every clan had seers. Not just one, either, but dozens, whole teams working together to shape the future to their liking. But, dragons being dragons, this brought them into constant conflict with other clans who were building different futures, ones where they ruled. Naturally, it was always the cleverest seers, the ones who used their knowledge of the future most audaciously, who came out the victors in these skirmishes. But no dragon clan has ever accepted defeat gracefully, and it was only a matter of time before a seer on the verge of losing tried something truly desperate and accidentally figured out a way to turn the future back in his favor permanently.”

  “How did that work?” Marci asked. “I thought the whole point of being a seer was looking into the future and meddling with stuff until you got the outcome you wanted, but nothing’s really sure until it actually happens, right?”

  The dragon grinned. “Not with this. Despite being grossly outmaneuvered by his enemies, this particular seer was very cunning. He knew he’d already been beaten and that the future he wanted was now so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. So, like any good dragon facing defeat, he changed the game. Since manipulating his own future was no longer an option, he reached further still, twisting the relationship between time, probability, and the nature of dragon magic itself to create a situation that allowed him to purchase one future over another.”

  Julius’s breath caught. That was exactly what Estella had said, that the future was bought and paid for. But, “How can you buy the future?”

  “By trading one for another,” the dragon replied, its voice taking on a lecturing tone. “When it comes to seer magic, all potential futures are simply matters of probability. Some outcomes—such as what happens when you drop a stone—are so likely as to be practically guaranteed. Drop a stone, and it will fall. Others—such as the rise and fall of one particular dragon clan over another—are more fluid. Traditionally, seers combat this by using their cunning to influence key critical events in a timeline until their desired outcome becomes as unavoidable as that falling stone. But achieving that level of certainty is very difficult when multiple seers are all trying to influence the same events at once. For our wayward seer, it was nigh impossible, and so the question became, how can we create a fixed point? How can we forge a chain of events so guaranteed that no decision or stroke of random chance can possibly change or upset it?”

  The dragon stopped there, looking down expectantly at Julius and Marci. “Uh,” Julius said at last. “I don’t—”

  “Potential,” the dragon interrupted with a grin. “Seers draw their power from time, and time is infinite. Unfortunately, that’s a very difficult sort of power to leverage since, as your highly perceptive mortal pointed out earlier, time marches at a fixed rate. No matter how far you can see down the line of time, you can’t go out and gather it up, because it hasn’t happened yet. But, until a future event actually does or does not take place, there is always the potential for it to occur, and that potential has a certain amount of magical weight when you’re talking about two seers fighting over a future.”

  “You mean, if two seers are fighting over two possible futures, the one who has the timeline with the highest potential will win?” Marci asked.

  “Precisely,” the dragon said, nodding happily. “But—and here’s the trick—that seer with the winning timeline doesn’t actually have to cash all that potential on that specific future. Strictly speaking, when it comes to seer magic, the magical weight of any given future is interchangeable. It can be applied anywhere, any when. And if you gather enough of it together and invest all of it in one specific chain of events, then you can create a future so potentially likely that nothing—not other seers, not even the decisions of those involved—can keep it from coming true.”

  The dragon finished with a proud flourish, but Julius was utterly lost. “I don’t get it.”

  “I think it’s like a magical version of potential energy,” Marci said, tapping her fingers on her chin. “Like, if you’re a seer, and your powers are entirely based around seeing and manipulating the future, then any event that could happen carries a magical weight based on its likelihood. Normally, seers increase the potential of a specific future by going around and influencing events in the present, but this one seer found a way to cheat. Rather than trying to influence what will happen by meddling in what’s going on right now, he just looked into his own future, grabbed everything that was likely to happen, and then used the massive weight of all those potential events to reinforce the one timeline that he actually wanted until no one else could move it.”

  “Brava,” the dragon said, eyes gleaming. “You are a clever mortal, aren’t you?”

  Marci preened under the dragon’s praise, but Julius’s mind was whirling. “I think I get it,” he said. “But if future events have magical weight based on their potential, and you use that magic to force the future you want over all the others, what happens to that potential? It seems to me that, if you’re burning something for power, it’s going to get used up.”

  Dragon Sees the Beginning sighed. “And thus we come to how things went wrong,” he said darkly. “You are exactly right, young Heartstriker. At its most basic level, what our rogue seer discovered was a way of trading the vast potential of multiple possible futures for one specific chain of events. As you might imagine, it takes an absolutely enormous amount of potential futures to force even a minor guaranteed happening. And the more resistance you need to overcome—either from other seers fighting back or becaus
e the timeline you’re trying to force was already extremely unlikely—the more power, which is to say the more future, you need to expend to push it through.”

  “So it’s a terribly inefficient exchange,” Marci said. “You have to slash and burn a ton of the future to get even a minor guaranteed outcome.”

  “Precisely,” the dragon said. “At the time, of course, no one saw a problem with that. After all, there’s only ever one actual timeline that comes to pass. That means all other potential futures are destined to be wasted by definition, so why not use them? Also, time is infinite. Who cares if the exchange rate is inefficient when there’s literally no end to the power you’re exchanging?”

  “So how did it go wrong, then?” Julius asked. “I’m assuming all the seers started doing this?”

  Dragon Sees the Beginning nodded. “Every single one. It was a revolution. Why scrabble around influencing events in the present when you could just buy an outcome with a potential future you weren’t even using? Within a year, every significant event—births, deaths, wars, even the outcomes of races—was determined by chains of events bought in advance by seers and paid for with the future. When two clans clashed, victory no longer belonged to the cleverest or most cunning, but to the seer who was willing to pay the most. This went on for centuries, and then, without warning, the future began to run out.”

  “Run out?” Marci said. “How is that possible? You just said time is infinite.”

  “Time is infinite,” the dragon replied. “But a seer’s reach is not.” He looked back to Julius. “In their desire to win, your ancestors recklessly burned all of the future they could see until, eventually, there was no immediate future left. Every potential outcome, every possible future where dragons existed that the seers could reach had been grabbed and leveraged until there was nothing left, and when that happened, our world ended.”

  “Ended,” Julius repeated. “You mean, time just stopped? Just like that?”

  “Just. Like. That,” the dragon growled. “By the time the seers realized what was happening, we had less than an hour left to evacuate. The dragons you know are the descendants of those who escaped, the ones smart enough to run. The rest—the ones who ignored the warnings or who refused to leave their lands and hoards—simply ceased to exist, along with their treasures.” Dragon Sees the Beginning turned to gaze up at the blood-red moon. “Of all the futures of our world, only one second remains. As guardian of the past, I stayed behind to stretch out that moment as long as I could. That is the time I exist in when no one else is here, the reason I, too, am not sucked into the void beyond worlds. Everything else—the desert, the sky, the future represented in these chains—you brought in with you, a construct of a lost home taken from your racial memory. When you leave, it will vanish again, and I will return to the frozen stillness where nothing exists but memories. The last figment of our once great home.”

  The great dragon said this with a sadness Julius felt to his bones. Having been born on Earth, he’d never given much thought to where his ancestors had lived before that. Now, though, despite only seeing a shadow of a fragment pulled from memories he’d never known he had, Julius felt the loss of their home like an ache. But it was the waste, the greedy, reckless gall of what had been done here, that made him shake with rage. “I never knew,” he said, clenching his fists as he stared up at the giant dragon who wasn’t a dragon at all. “How did I not know this!?”

  “Because dragons are proud,” the guardian said. “They would rather look to the conquest of a new land than remember how they destroyed the old.”

  “That’s not pride,” Julius spat. “That’s arrogance.”

  “That’s dragon nature.”

  Dragon Sees the Beginning chuckled as he said this, but Julius didn’t think it was funny at all. They’d had a home, a place with no spirits trying to kill them where they could live without displacing anyone else, and they’d burned it to the ground. The story of how his ancestors had destroyed their own future trying to one-up each other was the most entitled, draconic, stupid thing Julius had ever heard, and given the way most dragons still acted, he could absolutely see it happening again. It was happening again. Right now, Estella had traded who-knew-what to chain his clan to a future of her choosing just so she could beat Bob, and the whole thing was so petty and wasteful and stupid, it made him feel ill. It also gave him an idea.

  “You remember everything that’s ever happened here, right?”

  Dragon Sees the Beginning nodded. “All history is my domain.”

  “So do you remember a seer named Estella the Northern Star who came here last month?”

  The dragon’s expression darkened. “I do, but I would not suggest following her example, young Heartstriker.”

  “I have no intention to,” Julius promised. “But is there any way you can tell me what future she bought?”

  The dragon lowered its head with a thoughtful growl. “No,” it said at last. “As my name would imply, I look backwards, not forwards. But I can tell you that, whatever timeline she bought, she traded all of her potential futures to do so.”

  “All?” Julius said, horrified. “How could she trade all her futures? Wouldn’t that mean she would die at the end?”

  “It does,” the dragon said. “Though I don’t think she considered that an issue.”

  “How is dying not an issue?” Marci asked.

  “Because, like the seer who first discovered how to trade away the future, Estella was already beaten,” the dragon said sadly. “I read her past just as I read yours. I saw how your brother, Brohomir, had cut her off at every turn, walling off her future piece by piece until only decline was left. When she arrived in this place, her mountain of potential futures was little bigger than a hill. Her hatred, however, was stronger than ever, and being a seer, she knew she had no hope of victory left. Given those circumstances, the exchange of a long but bleak future for certain victory over the enemy who’d trapped her in that situation to begin with seemed like a fair trade, indeed.”

  That was unexpectedly depressing, and for a moment, Julius actually felt sorry for Estella. But while he was sympathetic to how desperate she must have felt, none of that excused what she’d done to his siblings and Katya. Or to him and Marci, for that matter. “Okay,” he said. “If you can’t tell us what future she bought, can you at least tell us how many chains she left with?”

  “Four,” the dragon replied immediately. “She left here with four chains, all of varying lengths. I’m not sure about the shorter ones since, again, the future isn’t my domain, but I’m reasonably certain that the longest was for three days.”

  “Are you serious?” Marci said. “Estella traded her entire future for three days?” The dragon nodded, and she whistled. “That’s one bad exchange rate.”

  “She’s fighting Bob,” Julius reminded her. “She probably needed the power.” Still, hearing she’d left with only four chains was a relief. That accounted for Chelsie, Conrad, Amelia, and Svena, meaning that Justin—whatever trouble he might be in—at least wasn’t bound to Estella’s future. “You said the longest chain she bought was three days. Is that twenty-four-hour days?”

  “Sun up to sun down is the traditional definition,” the dragon said. “So whatever that means for your realm.”

  Julius scowled, thinking the timing through. Since Svena had been acting strange the longest, she was probably the target of Estella’s longest, three-day chain. At the party on Friday night, Bob said Svena’s future had vanished that morning, so if the chains lasted from sunrise to sunset, and Friday morning was sunrise number one, then Svena’s chain would run out at sunset on Sunday, the same time as Ian and Svena’s mating flight.

  That timing lined up way too well. Other than the party where she’d set all this up, the mating flight was the one time Estella was guaranteed to have Bethesda and her children in one place, which made it the obvious time to strike. That timing would also explain why all the other chains had been shorter. Estella
had needed Svena’s obedience from the very beginning, but she’d hadn’t needed his siblings until right before she was ready to kick her final plan into action. But while Julius was certain all of Estella’s schemes would come crashing together at the mating flight, he still had no clue what she was actually trying to accomplish.

  “Mother’s the obvious target,” he said, thinking out loud. “But it doesn’t feel like enough. If she just wanted to kill Bethesda, she could have attacked at the party and been done with it. Sure she would have died for it, but we’ve already established that Estella doesn’t care about that, so why go through all this trouble? Why drag everything out for three days and spend her own future to bring Conrad, Chelsie, and Amelia into it?”

  “Sounds like business as usual to me,” Marci said, rolling her eyes. “From what I’ve seen of your brother, seers can’t go to the bathroom without turning it into a chess game.”

  “True,” Julius agreed. “But this is too twisty even by seer standards.” And the more he thought about it, the more the whole thing felt wrong.

  He’d always assumed Estella was gunning for Bethesda since the Three Sisters’ seer made no bones about wanting to bring down their clan and cutting off the head would be the obvious way to do that. That said, though, when did seers ever do what was obvious? He had no doubt that Estella hated Bethesda with a passion, but when you looked at what she’d actually done since her return on Friday, all of it had been aimed at Bob. Threatening his clan, taking over the siblings he actually cared about, cheating at his game—they were all stabs at her fellow seer, the only enemy on the board who could actually hurt her.

  Thinking about it that way made Julius feel like he actually had a handle on Estella’s plans for the first time since she’d crashed his mother’s party. If you assumed her target was, and always had been, Bob, then all of this convoluted craziness made a lot more sense. But while he could now see Estella’s endgame, he still had to figure out a way to stop it. Normally, he’d say that was impossible, that a dragon like him just didn’t have the tools to fight a seer. But his situation at the moment was hardly normal, and as he looked down at the giant, breathing mountain of possibilities that was his own future, a crazy idea started to form in his head.