It took Morgan a while to fully calm down.

  By the time she had settled enough to continue our discussion, the instability that had rocked my Dreamspace had largely faded. I could only hope that whatever Morgan thought was going to upset me greatly did so to a degree where I could control my reaction. Knowing that something bad was coming often seemed to help curb the worst of my negative feelings when it finally occurred.

  “Okay then… back to lecture time,” Morgan grumbled as she laid by the side of the water. I had chosen to remain immersed. Something about the water seemed to have innate calming properties. “We’ve already established that dragons ‘grow’ by eating magic. This can come from enchanted objects, absorbing it naturally in areas of concentrated wild magic, or by consuming the life force of living creatures.”

  Morgan looked at me with a grim expression, her crests pressed flat to her head. “So when we all hatched and found that our mother was dead in the nest, what do you think happened?”

  The implication of what Morgan was saying unsettled me. It wasn’t quite as bad as the first revelation that my mother was dead before I’d hatched, but it left a deep sense of unease curling through my gut. While creatures needed to eat to live, the thought of consuming the flesh of my own parent made my instincts cringe. It was… unnatural.

  “Did you…?” I asked slowly, leaving the question hanging in the air.

  Morgan looked away from me, clearly uncomfortable from the way her tail wrapped around herself. “... Only a little. Enough that I didn’t starve. Not enough to make me strong enough to survive what came next.”

  “So the others… the rest of our siblings, they all consumed our mother’s corpse?” My tail slapped the water. The simmering rage that had become a part of me threatened to flare up. I was expecting it this time, so I mastered the urge to lash out before it spun out of control. “That’s why they became powerful so quickly. A dragon’s flesh, especially an adult one, must contain… an unthinkable amount of magic.”

  Morgan nodded at me in response. “First started it. He hatched before any of the rest of us. By the time I hatched, he’d convinced the others to follow his head. I’m certain that he ate the ‘best’ parts before any of the others had a chance. While we were in the nest together, he became strong so fast that the rest of us didn’t have any time to resist. He was able to force names on the rest of us and convince the others to turn on me without a fight.”

  “But you said that you only began to learn about what it meant to be a dragon after you’d hatched,” I replied thoughtfully. Something about the situation just felt ‘off’. “Even if First hatched before you, how would he have the knowledge required to get such a strong lead on the rest of you? It’s almost….”

  “... Almost what?” Morgan trailed her claws across her flattened crests as she watched me uneasily. She’d clearly been expecting me to explode in anger again. My quiet contemplation seemed to unnerve her.

  That was probably the correct response. As I thought about what I was being told more, I had quickly sailed out beyond fiery anger into the icy depths of cold and calculating wrath. What First had done was absolutely vile on the most base level. Everything I heard about him made me hate him a little more.

  “It’s almost like he knew what to do the moment he hatched,” I replied eventually. “Like someone gave him information on how to become strong as fast as possible and manipulate the rest of you into doing his bidding. I had to learn how to use my innate abilities, magic, Oaths, and so many other things the hard way, almost without assistance.”

  I wasn’t going to discount the help I had gotten from Morgan and other people in my life, but a lot of what I knew came solely from trial and error.

  “Who would do something like that, and why?” Morgan asked as she sat backwards, narrowing her eyes. She didn’t seem suspicious of my claim. If anything, it rang with Truth all on its own. “Everything First has done has pushed our siblings into a maddened dash to gain as much power as possible in a short amount of time. Who stands to gain from that? It’s mostly caused destruction and chaos from what I’ve seen through your eyes.”

  “I don’t have much to base it on, but I think there are other dragons than us out there.” My mouth was barely above the waterline as I floated in deep thought. “The people of this world clearly know what the concept of a dragon is. We’re recognized on sight, but no one ever talks about other dragons. Veda and the Witch Hunters seem to know more than most, but they were incredibly cagey about it.”

  “... They called me ‘Lord Draconis’. That didn’t seem like a title they made up on the spot.” I pushed my head up further out of the water and settled it on the stone bank of the pool. “I think that a dragon, or something like one, has had a significant influence on them at some point. Maybe it’s an elf thing? It can’t be a coincidence, how Visk mentioned the way they seemed to attach to me, in the same way that Visk themself did… just to a lesser degree.”

  “Are you planning on recruiting an army of androgynous elf warriors?” Morgan asked me teasingly. My irritated glare in her direction made her scoff and preen herself again. “I’m just joking. Besides, it seems like one elf is more than enough for you to handle. Your mates are a fractious bunch.”

  “Okay now hold on,” I interjected as I fully pulled myself back out of the water. The stone floor of the Dreamscape shook briefly as I flopped down on my belly. “I’m not letting you skirt around that topic again. What do you mean they’re my mates? And more important than that, what were you talking about that one time you mentioned ‘crystallization’?”

  Morgan sighed deeply. “We’re really doing all the difficult conversations back to back? Ugh, fine. But I want you to shut up and listen rather than get in a huff this time.”

  Reluctantly, I agreed.

  “Alright, so: one of the few visions I was able to witness in the Dragon Dream discussed what we ought to focus on after leaving the nest,” Morgan explained in as few words as she could manage. “The ‘Big Three’ were: locate and secure a ‘Den’, build a treasure hoard, and consume a ton of magical power.”

  Rather than interrupt Morgan, I waited patiently and silently for her to continue. This was as close to a proper lesson on being a dragon as I’d ever gotten.

  “Clearly, you’ve done all three,” Morgan continued. “While it wasn’t explicitly shown in the vision, we can infer that meeting these conditions are important to trigger the transition from ‘hatchling’ to ‘adolescent’. While you were getting bigger, to my knowledge you only truly transitioned stages once you’d gotten set up in the Red Hills.”

  That was pretty much correct by my reckoning. The first time I’d slept in my Den had triggered a fundamental change in how I interacted with the world. I nodded, so Morgan kept speaking.

  “I never saw a vision on what we were supposed to do after satisfying the original three conditions. Perhaps there was another one that I missed out on due to… y’know, the whole ‘being dead’ thing. But if I were to hazard a guess, there were probably a second set of conditions for triggering another stage of growth, from adolescent to ‘young adult’. The most likely candidates I can think of are: ‘consume even more magic’, ‘grow your hoard’, and ‘gather a group of minions’.”

  I finally interrupted. “I can understand ‘eat even more magic’... I got plenty from defeating Third, but what about the other two? The pile of treasure in my hoard has only grown a little bit, and I don’t remember recruiting any minions.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Morgan rolled her eyes at me. “Yeah because you decided to hoard one of the hardest things to protect: People. All the people that you’ve been dumping your magic into are connected to you. The only time dragons are supposed to do that is when they form a Bond with a ‘Mate’. It was one of the few things we were told to not do in the Dragon Dream.”

  “That… doesn’t make sense,” I replied. My wings fluttered in agitation. “I’ve used magic on… a decent number of people, they can’t all be ‘mates’.”

  “That’s not what I said, idiot.” Morgan got up from where she’d been perching and moved over to flick me on the snout with her claw. I resisted the urge to nip her in return, for now. “Using your magic on other people is fine. That’s probably how you’re supposed to recruit ‘minions’, which is what the goblins are by the way; a group of mortals you recruit to serve you and guard your lair while you're asleep or away.”

  “... Forming a Bond requires giving a part of yourself to the other person and forming an ‘emotional’ connection with them. Both of those are innately magical due to our draconic heritage. Doing those also creates a massive weakness that others can exploit.”

  I couldn’t exactly reject what Morgan was describing. That did very much sound like what I’d either attempted or accomplished with my Cassia, Visk, and Edith. While each of those relationships had worked out differently from each other, I’d not pursued any of them with the intention of making them my ‘Mates’. They had all become people I didn’t want to lose, even if in Edith’s case that dynamic was decidedly fraught.

  “I won’t be made to regret connecting to any of them,” I said in a surly manner. “Each of them has changed me for the better and informed who I am as a person.”

  “While that’s all well and good, that brings us to ‘crystalization’.” Morgan went and sat back down to resume the lecture. “It was mentioned in one of the last visions I saw before I was betrayed. Specifically, we were told that we should prepare everything we had gathered to last for a long time without us being around to protect it. ‘Mortal’ servants in particular were mentioned as something that we shouldn’t get overly attached to, since by the time we returned, most if not all of our original minions would have perished from old age.”

  “So it’s like the forced periods of sleep that I require to process a large amount of magical power.” My claws raked across the stone floor of the dreamscape. “But much longer… Did your vision say anything about how or why it would occur?”

  Morgan shook her head. “No, it didn’t. It only mentioned the term ‘crystalization’ in a way that made it sound like it was the… ultimate end goal, I guess; the point where dragons no longer had to work their tails off to gather power. Mates were mentioned as something that should only be pursued after crystallization, which I suppose means it's not a metaphor for us dying or something.”

  “It would certainly be strange if visions were guiding us towards our demise, but that still leaves a lot out. I could understand if these visions were simply a means by which dragons could communicate the complex concepts involved in our existence to hatchlings, but what you described sounds a lot more like a path someone laid down for others to follow.”

  “So you don’t think the Dragon Dream’s visions were in our best interest?” Morgan cocked her head at me, her suspicion evident from the way her tail flicked lightly back and forth behind her.

  “I didn’t say that, just that it seems… limiting, in some ways.”

  It certainly seemed to push hatchlings down a path that would lead to destruction and chaos for other creatures. A brood of intelligent flying predators that could grow their own power at an exponential rate was the last thing most mortals would benefit from. This ‘Dragon Dream’ that Morgan described basically told those witnessing it to ‘consume, pillar, and control’ the world around them, only to leave it all behind and disappear for years, if not decades, or even centuries.

  “So that’s pretty much all I know that you didn’t,” Morgan concluded. “There were some other visions that showed me how to fly or the basics of hunting prey, but you’ve figured out a lot of it on your own by now.”

  “Well, I suppose that answered some of my questions… while giving me more than I started with.”

  “Unfortunately, brother, that tends to be how the world works. It’s become pretty evident while riding around in your head, the one thing that this world doesn’t want to do is give you a straight answer.”

  Both of us fell into silence for a long while after that. Morgan had dumped some fairly major revelations on me, since she finally had me as a captive audience. In turn, I’d given her a new name and changed something fundamental in her soul in the process.

  To sum all that up, We Both Needed a Minute.

  “So, what are you going to work on now that you’ve got time?” Morgan asked me, breaking the silence.

  I looked up from where I’d been staring at the lines of Vitae being woven into the dream space. I’d noticed that if I wanted to, I could subtly direct the space’s expansion and development. Much like with my body, it was an instinctual process. Unlike with my body, it required a great deal of effort. Directing the torrent of magic was like trying to wrestle a large and ornery creature that didn’t want to be told what to do.

  Thankfully, I was particularly stubborn and well suited to handling such creatures. Otherwise this would have been an impossible task. The magic being absorbed into my core was improving ‘everything generally’, but if I wanted to focus that improvement on something in particular, it took a great deal of time and mental effort.

  “The first thing I was going to do was lay down and actually sleep,” I replied wearily. “As in rest my mind as well as my body. I probably don’t need to tell you that after everything I just went through, a couple of days spent just sleeping and nothing else is well warranted.”

  “... After that, I want to refine the existing pathways that lead out of my core. They all feel very… rough. For example, my ‘physical prowess’ has expanded quite a lot lately, but my actual fine motor skills are pretty much shot. I remember when I was a hatchling that I could perform all manner of tricks with my claws and tongue, but now they feel positively leaden in comparis-... What?”

  Morgan was giving me a ‘sisterly stare of disgust’.

  “What, Morgan?” I growled at her in irritation.

  “One of the things I’m mandating that you work on is your choice of words, Sanguine,” my sister chided me. “You have a nasty habit of not thinking about the implications of what you say, which can give the people around you a lot of… strange ideas.”

  “... Fine, if you promise to actually explain what’s wrong with what I’m saying, I’ll agree to watch my words more.” The look of relief on Morgan’s scaled features made me want to smack her with my tail, but I let my rage simmer back down for now. She was genuinely trying to help, in her own irritating fashion.

  “What about you?” I asked in return. “I’m guessing you can return to the crystal, but sitting around inside of it for an entire year would be pretty boring. Have any plans on how to spend the time?”

  “Aside from teaching you to not verbally flabbergast anyone in your vicinity?” Once again, I had to resist the urge to swat my sister. It was so very tempting. “I’m probably going to work on learning how to create and maintain illusions. A lot of what you ate from the Vampyr’s realm will prove useful to that field of research. It hoarded a lot of magical artifacts and research that were focused on warping mortals’ minds.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure that giving my sister the means to deceive people was a good idea, but she’d done nothing to indicate that she had bad intentions towards me or any of my people.

  “I guess I’ll have to work on parsing out specific magic from the flood,” I mused out loud as I looked up at the hurricane of magic slowly twisting above my core. “I might need your help to do it though. You’ll know what you’re looking for better than I will, and two Intents should prove more effective than one at keeping my core from lashing out randomly.”

  “... Uhm…,” Morgan started to say, then trailed off. When I looked over at her, she once again seemed uncomfortable. Instead of it being due to fear of my reaction to something she said, it looked like an internal struggle. Morgan seemed to want to say something, but kept fading back into silence every time she started.

  “Thanks. That’s all,” Morgan eventually concluded. She stood up from where she’d been perching by the pool of water. “I’m going to go… over on that bed of moss and lay down. Far away from you and your… weirdness. Have a nice nap.”

  She stomped off without waiting for me to reply. I didn’t really understand what was bothering her, but I supposed that I didn’t really need to. Not yet, anyways. Morgan and I were going to be stuck inside of my Dream for months with no other company. If I started pressing on her space now, we’d be at each other’s throats by the end.