Fort hurried after him, with Rachel and Jia right behind. “We need to be smart about this,” Jia whispered. “Remember how they found the books of magic? Humans were riding dragons. That means we were allies somehow.”

“Or we used them as horses,” Rachel murmured.

Another growl shook the tunnel, this one the most intense yet. Jia glared at Rachel, who put up her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, no more snarky comments!”

The tunnel was just like Fort remembered it from his dream. As they continued on, they started to see small golden stones lying on the ground. Picking one up, Jia showed it to them in surprise. “Um. This is actual gold.”

“And it belongs to someone,” Rachel told her, nodding in the direction of the growling. “Maybe leave it there for now?”

“I GROW IMPATIENT, HUMANS.” The voice shook the tunnel again, sending gold nuggets rolling back down the tunnel. It was the very same voice he’d heard in his nightmare, speaking to his father. “I WILL WAIT NO LONGER.”

Instantly, Fort’s body froze in place, no matter how hard he struggled to move. Everything immediately went dark as Rachel’s fireball extinguished, but from the groaning Fort heard nearby, he suspected he wasn’t the only one paralyzed. Air rushed around him as he felt his body rise into the air, out of his control, and begin floating along the tunnel at a dangerously fast speed. Without any light, though, there was no way of telling exactly what was happening.

That was, until he and the others emerged from the tunnel into the same cavern Fort had seen his father in.

The mounds of gold here rose several stories high in the air, lit only by a red glow coming from the center of the room. That glow filled Fort with a terror just like he’d felt when he first saw the Old One floating above the floor in the officers’ mess at the old school. He wanted to look away as he rose toward the glow, but he still had no control over his own body. He couldn’t even close his eyes.

As the gold fell away below him, Fort found himself staring into the gigantic red eyes of a beast as large as an airplane, covered in golden scales and curled lazily up around another pile of nuggets. Its wings flexed, sending mountains of gold flying, and it slowly moved its head closer to get a better look at them.

It was then that Fort noticed a second, less intense light glowing in the dragon’s hand, and his shock almost overwhelmed his fear, if just for a moment.

The dragon’s claws shone with a rich blue glow, the same light as Healing magic.

“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” it asked them, and Fort felt the paralysis leave his face, letting him speak.