“I could not teach her to do what we do; she was not born to it. It frustrated her, but she accepted facts she could not—at that time—change. What we attempted to teach her was the underlying concept of the web itself.”

Bakkon chittered then; the chittering lasted for much longer. Kaylin didn’t understand the language, but she took some hint from the way he’d drawn his limbs toward his body. And the volume of the unintelligible words.

I would guess that what he attempted to teach is not taught. Clearly Starrante is cringing, Severn offered.

How can you tell?

Body hair, and the direction of the one eye he’s lifted from his central core.

“Bakkon is not pleased.”

“It was a long time ago,” Kaylin offered the angrier Wevaran.

“There is a reason,” he said, practically hissing, “that the web cannot be traversed or manipulated by outsiders—it is the heart of our people, the place from which we are born, and to which we return upon death.”

Kaylin immediately held up a hand as if she were still a mostly despised student in the Halls of Law.

Bakkon lifted a limb and waved it, which she assumed was an invitation to ask her question. “Is that like the Barrani Lake? Is that where you get your names from?”

Silence. Wrong question.

“Sorry—I know Dragons aren’t born with the entirety of their names; they’re not like Barrani, who can’t wake unless a name is bestowed upon them by someone who is not their mother. I didn’t mean to ask a question that’s somehow offensive.”

Starrante chittered in Bakkon’s direction. “He is old,” Starrante then said, almost apologetically, “and has always been somewhat... I believe Robin would call it ‘stuffy.’ Your question does not translate well; it is almost a threat.”

“Not what I intended. At all.” Kaylin spoke in emphatic High Barrani. “We don’t need True Names to wake. We don’t need True Names to exist. True Names are like magic, to us.”

“Technically speaking, they are indeed magic: so much power and so much that is unknowable. Even the so-called spells of the young are, to us, a scratch upon the surface of the power they are actually touching. We are born in very inhospitable circumstances. Many, many hatch—we have more young than the Dragons, when we survive to breed.

“But most of the children don’t survive. In the dark, we kill each other in a frenzy of hunger and fear. This has long caused...discomfort in other races, although we do not interact with any other people until we are fully adult. Once, perhaps, that might have been possible—but it would not be safe.

“We were not raised to value safety; our imperative was survival.”

Bakkon chittered again.