“But at the time, I felt it likely that there would be no more young—none of my kin, emerging from darkness into light. I wished the knowledge not to be lost. It is why, in the end, I am Arbiter and Bakkon could not be. I cannot see how Azoria could take what little information I could share and use it to her advantage—but the application of knowledge once considered harmless has oft been surprising.

“She could not use the birthing place to become what we are; she could not—to my knowledge—derive any power from it.”

Bakkon chittered, his voice more subdued.

“Yes,” Starrante replied, still speaking in Barrani. “If there were a clutch of young again, and she could somehow reach the birthing place and survive them, she could possibly derive power from that; Bakkon is afraid that she would become the Devourer, rather than the devoured; that it is not one of our kind who would emerge, but Azoria.

“But as I have told Bakkon: there are no young. The birthing place is empty of all words, all power, all life.”

Kaylin, who had decided that questions were a bad idea, nonetheless raised her hand.

“Yes?”

“Are you saying that the power to become adult is derived in its entirety from devouring your clutch mates?”

Starrante did not reply.

Kaylin was uncertain that she’d gotten what she needed from this visit to the Academia; she had questions—more questions—and distinct unease.

Larrantin, however, had taken hold of the question Kaylin probably shouldn’t have asked; he had questions of his own, and he asked them without apparent shame or delicacy. “You are implying that those of you who emerge have words at their core, just as the Barrani do, but they gain those words by devouring each other.

“Which implies—heavily—that in some fashion each of your clutch mates is born with a...fragment of a word? And that the devouring of the fragments somehow becomes a True Name?”

“I told you!” shrieked Bakkon, in the highest of pitches Kaylin had yet heard him use.

“Perhaps it is why we do not view our birth or our fight in the same fashion other races do,” Starrante conceded. “We feel we are all of our clutch. In some fashion, we are. Our birth is not your birth; it is not the hatching of the Dragons. It is certainly not the birth of the mortals, who live without necessary words and die so quickly, consumed in almost an instant by the ravages of time. There is no amity, no friendship, between any individual element of the clutch—and on occasion, not one, but two might emerge from the birthing place, although that is very, very rare.