As they flew onward, Dorvin's eyes stung and watered. He told himself it was only the cold wind.

"Do you think it's truly out there?" he said to his sister, his voice too soft for the others to hear. "A kingdom called Requiem, a home for our kind?"

Beads of sunlight glimmered on her lavender scales. "Travelers whisper of Requiem. The demon we slew spoke the name. A place for dragons." She nodded, tears in her eyes. "Requiem exists. We will find her fabled column of marble, and we will find a home."

Dorvin took a shuddering breath, trying to imagine it. An entire kingdom of weredragons! A place where they would be accepted, no longer feared or spat upon. Nobody would call him cursed there. Nobody would strike his sister. In the clouds, Dorvin pretended that he could see this fabled new kingdom, a sanctuary founded only this winter. In his mind, he saw soaring columns of stone, palaces of gold, cobbled streets, statues, and thousands of others like him. Raised in a tribe of hunter-gatherers, Dorvin had never seen a city before, but he had heard tales of cities—they said some existed beyond the sea—and that was how he imagined Requiem. A city of marble, gold, and dragon magic.

They flew onward, crossing plains of grass, rustling forests budding with spring leaves, and chalk mountains whose faces gleamed golden in the sun. Sheets of rain swayed in the east, and the sun gleamed in the west. The shadows of dragons swept across the endless world, crossing rivers, hills, and valleys. Tribes of hunters raced below, smaller than ants from up here, pointing upward at the dragon flock. Mammoths raced through grasslands and wildebeests swept across plains. The world seemed eternal, empty, rising from darkness into a dawn of life.

It's a dawn of dragons, Dorvin thought. Requiem rises.

They flew until the sun set and the stars emerged. Millions of these sky spirits gleamed, and among them shone their stars—the stars shaped as a dragon, the Draco constellation. Alina called the constellation a goddess, the Sky Dragon who protected their kind, and as she flew, she prayed to those stars. Her voice rose in song.

"Stars of dragons! Forever we fly in your light. Forever you will shine upon us. We are dragons. We are Requiem. Ours are the stars."

The others sang too, twenty dragon voices singing in the night. "Ours are the stars."

They had been flying for many days and nights now, sleeping in the wilderness, crossing the marks, traversing the world, seeking that pillar, that beacon of marble, seeking King's Column—the heart of their legendary home. Sometimes Dorvin wondered if they'd ever find it, if it even existed.

If there is no Requiem, he thought, and if King's Column is but a fable, we will seek her still. If Requiem does not exist upon the land, she will exist in our hearts, a light that forever guides us.