But Kaleth shook his head. “It is none of our doing, or of the gods’,” he said firmly. “The Magi have already put all of this in motion, and it will happen whether we use the opportunity or not. They have chosen to besiege the Winged Ones, the people will come to protest, and they will use the Eye, triggering the shake.”

“Then we must make use of it, and take the bitter herb and make a medicine of it,” Ari said, standing up. “We have a plan. Let us put that into motion.”

Train your dragons to trust you to be their eyes in the darkness.

Easier said than done. And without Aket-ten, it would have been impossible.

First, the dragons did not want to be kept from their warm sands when the sun went down. They whined and complained and rebelled as much as if they had been asked to fly in the rain. If Aket-ten had not been able to tell them it was a needed thing—though she could not explain to them in ways they would understand why it was needed—it would not have been possible to keep them from their pens and well-earned sleep.

Second, they truly, passionately, fearfully did not want to fly once the sun was down, even when it was only dusk, and not true dark.

Because, according to Aket-ten, they could not see a quarter of what their humans could see once the brightest light was gone. As they lined up in the last light of the day, heads down and tails lashing, their apprehension was so thick Kiron could practically taste it.

“It is the opposite of cats,” she said, putting a comforting hand on the quivering shoulder of Re-eth-ke, whose objections to doing this unnatural thing were as strong as any other dragon’s, despite Aket-ten’s constant reassurances in her mind. “They may be able to see a mouse from the clouds by day, but they cannot see an elephant at fifty paces once the darkness comes.”

Kiron and Baken racked their brains to try and devise some training that would lead the dragons to trust in their riders, and in the end, it came down to breaking all of flying down to the simplest of parts.

First, and hardest—landing in the dark. If they could manage to give their beasts the confidence that they could do this, that they could trust their riders to be their eyes, everything else would follow.

They all began by taking their dragons up just as the sun set. Now, this was actually an advantage. The dragons could still see, and they were very anxious to be down again—

So, as soon as the sun-disk dropped completely below the horizon, they all allowed their dragons to descend. Slowly. Very, very slowly.