Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
The fortress was where the dragon remembered it. There was no hesitation this time, no pause to wonder. It raked its mind through the hive-thoughts of the little ones within.
The chains first, it thought to those who flew beside it. The chains and freedom to those who were bound, freedom through tooth and claw. Then the little ones would burn, all of them, and the dragons would take that which did not belong here and send it back to the sleep whence it had come.
The dragon sifted from thought to thought and, as it did, found something it had forgotten. A mind. The one from the place in the burning desert and the lake of red salt. The one it had hunted. Here. Yet even as the dragon found that, it felt something else, something that passed like a ghost through the thoughts of another little one, like a ghost and yet like a titan passing among ants, so vast that it went almost unseen. They are here! it said, but the presence had already vanished again, and after that it hardly seemed to matter any more as the exultant fury of the fight took its place.
An age had passed since dragon had last fought dragon.