Eventually Astrid lost interest in fighting, or forgot what she was doing, and flew away alone. The two remaining red dragons landed, one at the front and one at the back of the property, apparently settling back in to work. When all had been quiet for some time, Fifer and Dev went downstairs to the courtyard and tentatively poked their heads out. From there they could see pieces of Florence’s body and one of the slain dragons. Fifer ventured outside a few more steps, not sure what to expect from the dragon guards at this point. She motioned for Dev to stay near the tower—she didn’t want him to get attacked in case the dragons were still riled up over him roaring. And she went alone to the yard to assess… well, everything.

Fifer gripped her head, utterly blown away. Florence, broken into a hundred pieces, was even more tragic close up. She almost didn’t want to see how strange it looked for Florence’s head to be severed from her neck and split in two halves from her headpiece to her chin. She knelt. “Is there any way to fix this?” she murmured. Could she possibly bring the statue back to life again? If so, how?

There was a time when Simber had completely disintegrated into a pile of sand, but Aaron had been able to bring him back. Panther had split in two, and Alex had brought her back. Not to mention all of the other less debilitating things that had happened to statues over the years. Even Florence had lost her lower legs once, but Ms. Octavia had been able to repair them, and the warrior woman had been as good as new.

But this was a little different. Just looking at Florence’s broken head made it obvious that Florence wasn’t “alive” at the moment. Perhaps the trauma had been so great that it immediately put the statue in a resting state, as if the world had ended, until something could be done to fix her. Fifer had no clue how to do that. But maybe Aaron could tell her.

Unfortunately, the two send spells that Fifer and Florence had sent back and forth were unusable for Aaron—try as she might, the spell had Florence’s name assigned to it, and that couldn’t be changed. Fifer looked around the grounds, wondering if Florence had been carrying the bag of spells when she got knocked down. She didn’t see it anywhere, though it was hard to find anything in the tall brush. If it wasn’t inside the palace, she’d have to comb the entire property in case it had fallen somewhere during the fight. Hopefully, one of the dead dragons hadn’t landed on it.