Five months before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon searched the river. Other dragons came and went, other thoughts, other distractions, but it never forgot. Here and there, when it stopped to look with care, it found traces of the little ones’ passing. Dead flesh, empty of life yet tainted with poison. It pulled them out of their hiding places and scattered them for the vultures and the crows. When it had searched every cave and turned over every rock and still found nothing that lived, it stopped and searched for its reborn mate.
The mountains, others told it, the younger ones who knew. There are most eggs in the mountains.
The dragon flew to the mountains to search and found nothing that interested it. It met a young one freshly hatched. One whose path had crossed with Bright Lands Under Starlight among the dwellings of the dead. His mate was gone, away to new flesh in a place far across the sea that had no end, beyond the storms that even a dragon could not cross except through the realm of the dead.
The hatchling spoke of other things too. It spoke of the hole in the underworld, yawning open, growing, of dragon souls swallowed and consumed, gone and destroyed for ever. The dragon considered these things and then let them fall aside. It had no use for them. It flew to the places where the little ones still cowered deep in their caves and under their stones and it searched. It stood on their battlements and reached into their thoughts while they slept beneath. In the smashed-flat wreckage of what had once been a proud place it found little ones hiding in the dirt, and among them it found a trace, a taste, a sniff of a memory, the flash of a face.
It burned them to ash and moved on until it came to the great fortress where the little ones had hidden away once before, centuries ago before their Silver King had come. To the place of the three mountains. It hunted through the thoughts and minds of the humans who cowered there, until it found the one it was looking for. And then it did something rare among its kind. It waited.