Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon understood time well enough, but the concept had little meaning. It hatched, it ate, it grew, it flew. Some day a strange feeling would come from inside. A heat that would not be denied. It would come like a flood, wave after wave, each one deeper and stronger than the last. Not with any pain, but with a tiredness. The dragon would lie down and fade and its essence would vanish away to the realm of the dead, a spirit seeking passage. Sometimes it awoke there alone. Sometimes others would come and go, others it knew. Sometimes it passed a shoal of the human dead, vanishing towards whatever end awaited them. Occasionally it found other things, trapped and best left well alone. Always, though, it felt the call. New flesh, begging for life; and always it answered, sought out the cries and devoured one and awoke, a hatchling reborn, cracking its hungry way from the egg. This was how a dragon marked the passage of time, not in seasons or suns, but in lifetimes.
Around the three spires of stone where the Isul Aieha had once lived it made its home. The little one it sought was always there. Never hidden, but walled within the stone where even a dragon could not reach. It hunted. It made sport of the prey in the ruins below. It roosted as the whim took it among the smashed palaces of the mountaintops, or else far away, but it always came back and the little one was always still there, a thorn in the dragon’s thoughts. It could not have said how long it waited, how many days passed as it came and went, feeding, hunting, soaring, sometimes alone, sometimes with others of its kind. It could not have said because it did not care. Mere days were such ephemeral things.
Then one morning the little one was gone. The dragon raked its senses through the mountains. All the others it had come to know, they were still there, but the one it wanted, that one was gone; and so the hunt began.