Settling on the floor, tucking her wings in at her flanks and wrapping her long tail around her feet, Lysira gazed around the dark and empty cavern and sighed. She could at last admit to herself that she’d been hoping—rather unrealistically—that she would find Draconas here.

She didn’t know why she expected him to be in the empty Hall.

Perhaps because he wasn’t anywhere else.

Dragons communicate mentally, mind-to-mind, using images and vibrant colors to exchange ideas. A dragon may block another from entering his mind, just as a human can stop others from entering his house. But, just as the house is still there, so is the mind of the dragon. Though the colors are unreadable and prohibit entry, they shimmer like foxfire in the night. And Draconas’s colors were nowhere to be seen.

Dragons dislike making hasty decisions. Lysira had been unsettled ever since the last meeting of Parliament—the meeting that had thrown the dragons into turmoil, the meeting in which Draconas had disclosed that the two children born to the human woman Melisande could communicate mind-to-mind, as could dragons. Not only that, but these humans could actually enter the minds of dragons! This was an awful, dreadful, catastrophic calamity. What’s more, Draconas had told Parliament that one of their number was a traitor, one of them was feeding information to the rogue dragon Maristara and her cohort, Grald. Because of this, Draconas had hidden away the two children, and he refused to tell anyone—even Anora, the wise elder dragon, the Minister of the Parliament—where they were to be found. He’d also claimed that this same traitor had been responsible for the deaths of her father and Braun, Lysira’s brother.

That meeting had taken place sixteen years ago. A long time, by human standards. A mere eye blink by dragon measuring. Lysira had spent those years dithering, wavering back and forth, trying to decide if she would talk to Draconas or not. For a couple of years, she thought she wouldn’t. He was the Walker, the dragon who took human shape to walk among humans and keep an eye on them. He had, therefore, lots of humans’ images in his mind, images Lysira found disturbing and distasteful. And fascinating.

It was the fascinating part that bothered her. She’d seen only a few of these images the last time he’d spoken to her, and she had since discovered that they kept cropping up in her dreams, breaking her tranquillity. Try as she might, she couldn’t banish them. She didn’t want to see any more of them. And yet, she did.

Once she had made up her mind that she would talk to him, a few more years passed before she found the courage to do so. She would start to approach him and then she would shy away and retreat back to her lair in a flutter of confusion.