Last Dragon Standing

by Rachel Aaron

  Amelia blew out a puff of smoke. “Fine,” she said, flapping onto Marci’s shoulder. “Who am I to interfere with the methods of Julius, Dragon Whisperer? Come on, Marci, let’s leave him to do his thing.”

  Marci must have been serious about sticking with him, because her jaw tightened. Before she could tell Amelia to go by herself, though, Julius gave her a pleading look. Amelia would never leave if she thought they were plotting without her. He didn’t know how to explain that to Marci without words, though, so he just looked at her until, at last, she reluctantly let go of his feathers, walking backward so she could keep her eyes on him the whole way as she escorted Amelia back to Bob.

  When they were out of earshot, Julius turned to find the Black Reach watching him. “That was neatly done,” the construct said, looking him in the eyes, which he was actually tall enough to do. The Black Reach’s human guise was big enough that he didn’t even have to tilt his head back to see eye to eye with Julius’s dragon. Smiling, Julius desperately hoped that was a sign he could convince the construct to see eye to eye with him on everything else.

  “So,” said Dragon Sees Eternity, reaching into his long sleeve to pull out the golden orb of the Kosmolabe. “Are you ready to go?”

  “No,” Julius said. “But surely you knew that.”

  “I did,” the construct replied. “But by mentioning it, I’ve reminded you that there is another way out of this, thus giving you the chance to reconsider.”

  That was some slippery seer work, but Julius expected nothing less from the Construct of the Future. “I need your help. I want to talk to Algonquin so I can try to change her mind about all of this, but she’s locked herself deep inside the Leviathan, and you’re the only one whose fire might be able to burn a path to her. You don’t have to go inside with us. We just need you to make us an opening. Please.”

  The Black Reach scowled. “Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider my offer?”

  “I’m sure,” Julius said. “Can you do it?”

  The eldest seer looked up at the black expanse of the Leviathan. “There’s a high likelihood that I could burn a hole through the Nameless End’s protective carapace, but the success of everything after that is significantly less probable.”

  “Any chance is good enough for me,” Julius said happily. “I just need you to get us in. We can handle the rest. Bob wouldn’t have sent me to you if he didn’t think we had a shot.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” the Black Reach said, his voice oddly bitter. “Brohomir is one of the greatest seers I’ve ever known, but this isn’t like his plans for you before. Those were the careful machinations of a master seer executing his life’s work. This is a desperate dragon grasping at straws.”

  “But there is a chance,” Julius said. “It’s not impossible.”

  “‘Not impossible’ isn’t the same as ‘possible,’” the construct reminded him. “There are chances for almost everything, but only a small subset of those actually go on to become fact. A proper seer knows to weed out the long shots, not bet on them, and as a proper seer, I cannot support your brother’s delusions. The chance of you successfully convincing Algonquin to banish the Leviathan is so infinitesimally small, it’s barely visible even to my eyes. Assuming she still possesses the ability to send the Nameless End away, the Lady of the Lakes has hated our kind since we came to this plane. She is the patron of Vann Jeger, the Death of Dragons, and the murderess of the Three Sisters. With the purge of the DFZ, she has been personally responsible for the deaths of more dragons than any other being in our history. No matter what logic you bring, what arguments you make, the most likely outcome is that she will not listen, and you will die.”

  He spoke this as though it were already past, but Julius knew better. “Is that what you see?” he demanded, digging his claws into the dirt. “When you look at the future, do you see Algonquin killing me?”

  “No, but that is merely due to a technicality. Seers can only see the futures of those connected to them, and Algonquin is none of ours. Our inability to foresee her decisions is how we landed in this mess in the first place. If I’d known she was going to bring a Nameless End to our doorstep, I would have destroyed her myself long before the drought. But I did not know, because she was not mine to see. You are, of course, but once you enter that thing, your futures become very hard to follow. Even I cannot peer easily through a Nameless End.”

  “So if you can’t see her and you can’t see me, how do you know she’ll kill me?” Julius asked.

  “Because it can be no other way,” the Black Reach snapped. “The future is never certain, but there are some things we can safely take as constants, and Algonquin’s hatred is one of them. She didn’t listen to you back in Reclamation Land. What makes you think she will hear you now?”

  “Because now is different,” Julius said. “Back then, she had all the power. Now she has none, because she’s given it up to the Leviathan. All I want is to help her get it back, and it’s a lot easier to listen to someone when they’re saying what you want to hear.”

  “It will. Not. Work,” the seer growled. “Just like Brohomir, you are allowing what you want to blind you to what is, and what is is over. The Nameless End has won. This plane is doomed. The only statistically likely chance of survival we have left is for you to accept my offer and flee to a new world before this one is devoured.” He leaned in closer, dropping his voice to a whisper. “You refused me before because you said I was leaving too many behind, but thanks to your efforts, almost every dragon in the world is currently in the DFZ. If you agree to run with me right now, there’s a very good chance we could get everyone gathered and through the portal before the planar barrier collapses. You could save them all that way, no long shots needed.”

  “But not Amelia,” Julius said. “Spirits are tied to this plane, which means no Marci, either. She’d never leave Ghost behind.”

  “There would be sacrifices,” the Black Reach admitted. “But for a much greater good.”

  “How good can it be if the only way to get there is by abandoning my friends and family?” Julius said angrily. “I’m not leaving them behind.”

  “So you would risk everyone?” the seer said. “Risk your brothers and sisters, all of your kind, to save the world’s most arrogant dragon mage and a single human?”

  “I’m not risking anyone,” Julius snapped. “I’m refusing to let you sacrifice them to buy an easy out. I still believe we can do this. You’re the one with doubts.” He tilted his head. “Why are you making this my decision anyway? You already have the Kosmolabe. You could open that portal and run whenever you want, with or without me.”

  To his surprise, the Black Reach lowered his eyes. “I am not without fault,” the construct admitted quietly. “I was built to guard the future of our species. A perfect seer, uncorrupted by the usual draconic appetites for conquest and domination. But steering the future cannot be done coldly. Guiding our kind to a better place requires a certain degree of optimism, and that leaves me as vulnerable to the beguilement of hope as any other dragon. Hope for the future is why I fell prey to Brohomir’s plan, and why I still linger now. The course with the highest chance of success would have been to open the portal the moment it became clear that your Merlin’s plan had failed, but I could not bring myself to do it, because I knew if I ran away then, the one dragon I wanted to bring most wouldn’t be with me.”

  Julius’s skin flushed beneath his feathers. “You don’t mean me, do you?”

  “Whom else could I mean?” the Black Reach asked, his ancient eyes pleading when he lifted them again. “You are the opportunity I’ve waited ten thousand years for, Julius Heartstriker. That’s why Brohomir chose you. He knew you were the only one I couldn’t kill, because killing you would mean killing my own hope. I’m certain you’re the one who can push us to a better future. No dragon has ever gotten all the clans to work together, but you did so in under an hour. What other miracles could you work, given the time?”
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  “But that wasn’t me!” Julius said. “Amelia got them here with threats!”

  “But why did Amelia call them?” the Black Reach asked. “And why did Svena help her? Why did the Golden Emperor pledge his support to the Heartstrikers, his sworn enemies for the last six centuries? Why did the Daughters of Three Sisters, the clan who has hated yours more than any other, fly to your aid? That wasn’t because of anyone’s threats. That was you. You forged those bonds just as you took your clan from Bethesda’s poison claws and made it into something better.”

  A smile broke over the construct’s face. “Do you know how long I’ve waited for a dragon like you? How many times I’ve tried to engineer the situations Bob created simply by placing you in them? I’ve spent my entire existence trying and failing to make dragons act as they do when you’re around, which is why I can’t leave unless you come with me. Brohomir positioned you well, but you were always the one who chose the better path, and I would risk almost anything to let you keep going.”

  Julius was ready to sink into the ground by the time the seer finished. He’d never been praised so much, and it felt all wrong, like something terrible was going to happen if the Black Reach kept talking. That said, everything terrible had already happened, which was the only reason Julius was able to swallow his embarrassment and meet the Black Reach’s gaze once more.

  “If you’re willing to risk that much for my sake, then help me,” he said, voice shaking. “Dragons can live in any world, but we’d do best in this one. You called her arrogant, but Amelia became the Spirit of Dragons for the same reason you want to save me. She’s also trying to make a better future. The Planeswalker sacrificed her ability to go to other planes so she could make us a home in this one. We’ve run from one plane already. Let’s do better with this one. We can save this world, I know it. But only if you’ll help.”

  The Black Reach looked away with a deep breath. “You ask more than you know,” he whispered. “I stand by my claim that your endeavor is almost certainly doomed, but to be honest, I’m no longer sure that I care. I am sick of watching my charges stupidly repeating the same mistakes. If the duty built into me by your ancestors wasn’t pushing me to save them at any cost, I’d help you in a heartbeat. I’d much rather dragonkind die here nobly defending their home than flee to another plane so they can kill each other pointlessly for another ten thousand years. But duty isn’t the only reason I’ve held back. There’s also this.”

  He placed a hand on his chest over the spot where the dragon fire burned when they were in human form. “The reason my fire is still able to burn the Leviathan is because it was never mine at all. I’m a construct. A magical creation, not a living thing, which means I can’t make fire of my own. I survive on the magic your ancestors breathed into me before they opened the portal to this world. As I am now, that combined flame is enough to keep me running indefinitely. But if I spend it to create a path through the Leviathan, the magic I burn will be gone forever, and what is left might not be enough to keep me functional.”

  Julius stepped back. “You mean you’ll die?”

  “That depends on how much I have to use,” the Black Reach said with a shrug. “If I use it all, then yes, I will cease to be. But even if I spend only a portion, what is left will almost certainly not be enough to allow me to continue my duties as guardian of the future, and as much as I wish to help you, that is a sacrifice I cannot make. I can bend the rules if I deem it necessary for the greater good, as I did with you and Brohomir, but I cannot abandon my duty entirely. Every seer tries to sell the future at some point. If I am not there to stop them, it won’t matter if we save this world today, because sooner or later, one of our own seers will end it.”

  “You don’t know that,” Julius said. “We can always destroy ourselves, but that’s the price of having choice: we have to choose correctly. I understand why my ancestors created you. They wanted someone to keep us from making the same mistakes they did. But by putting our future in your hands, they took the responsibility for it away from us, and that’s no good. If dragonkind is ever to mature as a species, you can’t make our decisions for us. Our future has to be our own to worry about and protect, not yours.”

  The Black Reach stared at him in horror. “You would have me abandon you,” he said. “Give up the purpose for which I was created!”

  “I want you to trust us to take care of ourselves,” Julius said. “You’ve said a lot of very nice things about me, but to be honest, the only noteworthy thing I’ve done is convince dragons that they could do what they already longed to. I didn’t make the Qilin choose happiness with Chelsie over suffering for his empire forever. He already desperately wanted to do that. All I did was convince him to go for it. Everything you want dragonkind to be is already inside us. It’s our culture that tells us to dominate and be cruel, not our nature. There are lots of nice dragons in the world. I’m just the only one so far who’s had a chance to show his true colors and live.”

  “Because of Brohomir,” the Black Reach said. “If dragons really are as far along as you claim, why did it take the greatest seer in centuries to ensure your survival?”

  “Because we’re having to fight against our own stereotype,” Julius said fiercely. “Against what venerable dragons like you are constantly telling us we are! If you really want to make a better dragonkind, start with that. Because the real problem isn’t that seers are selling the future, it’s that they feel that’s the only way. They’d rather face you, their death, than compromise or work together or do any of the other things we’re told from birth that we’re weak and stupid for wanting. That’s the mistake that must never be repeated! Not her.” He pointed back at Bob’s pigeon. “Amelia knew it too, which is why she tied herself to this plane. She was trying to buy us a chance to live long enough to mature past our megalomania stage. That’s the sort of progress you should be fighting to save, not me. I’m just one dragon, but this plane and what we’ve already achieved coming together trying to save it is the best shot you’re ever going to get at actually changing dragon culture. Our better future is already here! I just need you to help me make sure it doesn’t end before it can begin.”

  The Black Reach sighed. “And by that I suppose you mean burn a hole in the Leviathan for you?”

  “Only if you can do it without dying,” Julius said quickly. “I believe in everything I just said, but it’s still a long shot. Just because I’m willing to bet my life on that doesn’t mean I want to burn up everyone else’s last chance to run. No matter what happens, though, our entire species still came together today. That’s a huge step in the right direction, one you can carry into any other world. Just don’t let what we started today die, and I think you’ll have a better future no matter how this ends. So if you can help me, I’d appreciate it, but if it’ll cost you too much, go ahead and start evacuating as many dragons as you can. I’ll just find another way in.”

  By the time he finished, the Black Reach looked almost angry. That wasn’t what Julius had intended. He’d been trying his best to be reasonable, but when he opened his mouth to apologize for whatever he’d said wrong, the construct began to laugh.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Brohomir was feeding you lines,” the Black Reach said, shaking his head. “You truly are a dragon of a different color, Julius Heartstriker. It will be my honor to light your way into the Leviathan.”

  “Wait, really?” Julius said, shocked. “You’re sure it won’t kill you?”

  “I cannot say,” the Black Reach said calmly, looking up at the Leviathan. “It will take a massive amount of fire to burn through the carapace the enemy has built from Algonquin’s magic, and even more to keep the Nameless End from consuming you once you’re inside. I have no idea if I have enough, but I know I am the only one who could. With the death of the Three Sisters, no dragon remains who is old enough to produce a flame that could challenge a power of this magnitude. But I am Dragon Sees Eternity, one of the two greatest creations of
our old realm! Inside me burn the flames of all the ancient clan leaders, including those of your grandfather, the Quetzalcoatl. He was the wisest of all the great dragons, and you remind me very much of him. I believe he would have been proud to know his fire helped you now.”

  “But—”

  “The decision is made,” the construct said. “And we have very little time left. Now stand back. I will make you a path.”

  The words weren’t out of his mouth before the Black Reach began to change, his human body fading as it had when he’d threatened Bob. This time, though, it wasn’t just a claw that emerged from the shadows, but an entire dragon. The biggest Julius had ever seen.

  “Whoa,” he said, stumbling back.

  He’d known for a long time now that Dragon Sees Eternity was big. He’d seen his brother, after all. Despite Amelia’s all-clan roundup, Dragon Sees the Beginning was still the largest dragon Julius had seen by several orders of magnitude. At least, he had been until now. Julius wasn’t sure if the twin constructs had started out unequal, or if ten thousand years of being the only thing keeping a plane from collapsing had shrunken Dragon Sees the Beginning, but as huge as the bone-white construct of the past had been, he was nothing compared to the dragon that appeared now.

  Dragon Sees Eternity was as long as his name. Like his twin, his overlapping scales looked more like stone than anything organic, and each one was marked with a symbol in the ancient magical language of dragons that only experts like Svena could still read. But where Dragon Sees the Beginning had been white, Dragon Sees Eternity was as black as the void, his snaking body so enormous, Julius could no longer see the Leviathan behind him. He was trying to make sense of how something that big could even be alive when Marci ran up and grabbed his neck.

  “Oh man,” she said, clutching Ghost to her chest as she clambered onto Julius’s back. “This is going to be epic!”