He slept for most of the ride, beside Vrawn and Vrax in the hollowed shell of the carriage, Goll in front with the driver. Sometimes he fell against their hard, bristled bodies, which immediately woke him. He caught random glances of Daar Orr between half-closed eyes; the bustling night market, filled with waving antennae. The heaped mud towers of domed homes, or nests, multiple lit windows several stories high. Mita dragons writhing beyond his window, carrying as many as five riders. The rare, mi’owa-tagged human, five steps behind their owner. And everywhere, arthropods that walked, that crawled, some that flew. It had been years since he had left his modest farm, and yet he could not keep awake for long, so for everything he saw before his eyes closed, Ula missed even more.

He awakened. The bright lights had been left far behind. Around them it was almost as dark as his farmland after dusk; before them was the glitter of illumination. A building. The tem’ondri leant forward, the driver pulling up before huge gates made from mita dragon scales, Ula thought, wiping his eyes. They were the colour of dusk sky, curved and pointed at the tips. The art was popular in this part of the land. The temo’ndri made instruments, sculptures and cooking utensils out of dragon scales. They even used the powder as a clothing dye.

The taxi rode to the foot of huge steps. There was a silhouette at the top, a smaller shadow created by fierce light, a glow from the open doors of the nest. The tem’ondri exited, paying the driver. Ula climbed free, attention diverted by the nest, his neck craned upwards in an attempt to see it all.

It was the biggest he’d ever seen. Towers upon towers of compacted mud, chewed and digested and defecated into place, moulded and hand-shaped by thousands of tem’ondri workers. Some were made with modern building equipment, especially in the city, but there was only one way to attain the roughened texture and glittering finish Ula saw everywhere, from the steps, to the door frame, to the inner tunnels; that was to have the mud pass through the bodies of mita dragons, as the tem’ondri once passed it through their own. Claw-marked streaks lined the walls, creating sharp ridges, like spines. The nest reminded Ula of the Earth-bound castles he’d imagined when he father read to him as a child, tucked up in bed, a candle his solitary night light. Unlike those stone-hewn castles, the nests looked as though they were grown from the ground itself, nurtured like land cane, each level sprouting from the next in humped mounds until they rose into the night, even blocking the light of the moons.