“So that was… a lot,” Cassia said as we floated together in the dream realm. “I thought we were going to just go talk to a guy to get directions and then maybe fight one crazy old man… but I don’t think that could have gone any worse.”

  “We could have all died,” I replied ‘helpfully’. “In some ways, that one or more of us did not perish is what humans would call a miracle.”

  “I… yeah. I was… I was scared, Sanguine.” Cassia was holding onto one of my horns so that she didn’t float off into open space. All around us, the shifting colors of the dream realm cast her in various hues. “More scared than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Being separated from you was awful, even before things really went bad.”

  “I wasn’t pleased with it either, but you handled yourself well.” I turned one of my amber eyes to gaze at her as she floated near my head. A golden strand slowly coiled back and forth between us, flowing out of the gemstone embedded into her chest and into the ‘core’ of my body, which was roughly near my center of mass in my chest. “Visk and Sir Kenneth both told me that you were far more capable than they expected.”

  Cassia blew a puff of air out between her lips, sounding frustrated in spite of the attributed praise. “My body may be a lot stronger than it was before… and I think I’m also ‘tougher’ than I used to be. A couple of things that would have really hurt me before we met barely bothered me in the Tower… but I just felt… so useless.”

  “... I’m not a trained knight like Sir Kenneth or a… cool magic assassin or whatever Visk actually is. I’m just a silly girl who can use a bow decently well. Half the time you want to leave me behind just in case I might get hurt! And when… when I actually did…”

  Cassia trailed off into silence. Through the emotional bond connecting us, I could feel how troubled she was. She had started to accept more of my draconic nature after our last ‘major’ discussion, but seeing just how destructive and angry I could be still troubled her. I didn’t feel any blame or accusation coming from her. In fact, I could now understand what she was feeling a bit better.

  I was only going to continue to get stronger. The creature that I would be after I woke up, would be one that was in an entirely different league than when I went to sleep. While Cassia herself had gotten ‘stronger’, that was largely due to my magic’s influence on her body. Beyond that, my power was going to leave her in the dust. Having her fight beside me would be like asking a small child to fight with a fully grown adult.

  “Your value is not just about whether you can fight or not,” I said as my tail flicked back and forth behind me. The movement propelled Cassia and me into a slow spin. There was no weight or inertia here, so whatever movement someone started continued to occur until something else stopped it. “But I understand that you do not want to be left behind. That is not something I have a solution for, at present.”

  My eye stared into Cassia’s as she bit her lip and grimaced at me. “I don’t think it’s something that I can solve either. Edith spoke with me, before she left. I hope that she said goodbye to you before she did…?” Cassia gave me a brief not to confirm that had occurred before I continued. “But when we spoke… I told her that she did not need to confront all of her problems on her own. I think it is the same with this. I cannot do it for you, but neither can you fix what is troubling you on your own.”

  “So what do you think we ought to do?” Cassia asked as she moved her arms to loop around my neck. Her embrace barely fit, with her fingertips touching just a little bit behind my head. “It’s not like I’m a sorcerer who can make potions like Edith, or a ‘spy assassin’ like Visk… I’m just me.”

  “... When I ‘grow’, after I consume magic, I am able to direct that growth,” I explained slowly. The act was an instinctual one for me. Trying to describe how it worked was like trying to teach someone else how your heart beat. “We already know that you have likely gained some of your new strength by passively absorbing my magic through the gemstone in your chest. But have you tried to actively draw on that power to strengthen yourself?”

  “I’ve… huh. No,” Cassia said after a few moments of thought. “It’s just been kind of ‘there’, sitting inside of me. I’ve been able to push it towards you when I thought you needed it, but I don’t know where to begin using it on myself.”

  “Then that is something to work on, while I am asleep.” I curled my body around Cassia, slowly orbiting her as if she were the sun in the center of my world. “I shall have a great excess of magic available. Even if you waste some, there is so much that I doubt the loss will have any real effect. It would have been better if Edith stayed with us to help you… but maybe you can ask Visk. Their abilities seem to channel magic through their body. Perhaps by sharing your experiences with each other, you can both learn what you might have missed otherwise.”

  “Well that’s better than nothing,” Cassia said. She pressed her face against my side and went silent for a bit. “... Do I look silly in this dress?”

  “I think perhaps you look uncomfortable in it,” I replied carefully. While I didn’t understand why, I could feel that this was dangerous territory. Cassia had a lot of anxiety tied up in this subject. “It is… a lot more fabric than your usual attire.”

  “It’s stupid,” Cassia grumbled with her face pressed against me. “I should have known you wouldn’t really care, one way or the other.” Honestly, she had me there. I truly didn’t have an opinion about the dress. It existed, but then again I thought all human clothes that were purely utilitarian were a bit silly. The couple of examples I’d seen with gems threaded into them were ‘nice’, but I’d just as soon have had those gems adorning a piece of jewelry or my hoard.

  “Sir Kenneth and I made up a story about how I was a noble lady traveling in secret,” Cassia whispered to me. “It was a stupid idea, but it worked somehow… For just a little while, I was treated almost like I was a princess out of my storybooks.” She gave a deep strangled sigh of annoyance. “It was horrible. Everything was so stuffy and ‘polite’. Nobody thought I could do anything important! … More so than normal.”

  “... Yet you still like the pretty dress?” I asked with extreme caution.

  “... Yes I like the dumb frilly dress,” Cassia hissed like a cat that simultaneously wanted attention, but didn’t want to be touched. She clung to me all the tighter anyways. “It’s stuffy and impractical and I can’t move around in it… I’d never be able to hunt in it, but I still like the dress. It makes me feel like a princess, without any of the annoying parts.”

  “Then we’ll find a dress that can do both,” I said after some consideration. “Or maybe have someone make one. One that makes you look exactly like you want to look, but still lets you be the hunter I know you to be. My beautiful Hunter-Princess…”

  Cassia hid her face back against my scales. I could feel the confused tangle of emotions inside of her, but they were overall positive. The both of us lapsed into silence after that. For a long while, we simply enjoyed each other’s company in the dream, not having to worry about danger or something demanding our immediate attention.

  I couldn’t say exactly how long it lasted, but eventually Cassia started to fade away. She was drawn back to the waking world, while I descended ever deeper into the Dream. The swirling colors began to mix and spiral together as I fell ever downwards.

  A constellation formed within them, the burning lights of uncountable stars breaking through the kaleidoscopic dreamscape. For reasons I did not immediately understand, the lights were aching familiar. They called out to me in a way that I’d rarely felt.

  I was falling into the constellation. As they rose up towards me, I realized that each was not just a light…

  The constellation was formed out of the blazing souls of dragons.

  The light in front of me flared, blinding me. When it dimmed back down, I was inside of my Dream Den. While it still bore a vague resemblance to the physical location in the waking world, it was in the process of undergoing a major transformation.

  In the center of the Dream Den was the ‘core’, a nexus of shining golden light. It spun like a cyclone, drawing in the magic that had flooded the space. Other magic that I had consumed before had appeared like colored smoke floating in the air. Now, there was so much magic packed into the space that it had drowned the Dream Den like it was flooded with water.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I could see the effect that the torrent of fresh magic was having upon me. Each strand of magic that my core processed into Vitae and my own personal power was layered into the structure of the dream space. A thick mesh was being woven into every available surface, reinforcing its structure and making it glow with internal light.

  More than that, the strands of Vitae that could not find a place were pushing outwards from the ‘Inner’ Den. It was forced to expand outwards along tunnels that did not appear in the physical location this dream space was based on. I could sense that each tunnel formed a rudimentary path to power that I could choose to pursue, if I so desired.

  The largest of these tunnels radiated an aura of physical strength and dexterity. That was what I had put most of my focus on developing thus far, though never in such a starkly laid out fashion.

  Another tunnel that tingled against my Intent was probably one that represented the ‘Sorcerous’ style of magic. Beside it were two others. One was covered in something that looked like rough Runes, which I took to represent the art of Enchantment, or perhaps ‘Wizardry’.

  The last tunnel that related to magic was the smallest, but was simultaneously the most ‘solid’ of those I could see. Rather than roughly hewn stone, it looked like it had been formed out of carefully laid masonry. A myriad of scents that reminded me of people that I cared for flowed out of that tunnel.

  Before I had much more time to ponder the meaning of the changes to the dreamscape, a pink light floated out of the tunnel representing my bonds. It struggled against the pull of the golden spiral at my core for a few moments, before ultimately overcoming it. The pink light flitted over towards me and settled down close by.

  Sixth coalesced into a representation of herself a moment later. She seemed to have selected an adolescent draconic form, akin to the one I had when we had left Edith’s cottage in Greenreimse. Her overall form was one that seemed to focus on aesthetic appeal over physical might, but I noted that there was a new ‘sharp’ look in her eyes.

  Like as not, Sixth was preparing herself to ensure that she could not be ambushed and consumed a second time.

  “Ugh. I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to make it in here,” Sixth grumbled as she preened her numerous frilled crests along her head. “Getting out of that hunk of rock and into your head took a lot of effort. You’d be surprised at how much of a resemblance there is… between your head and a stone.”

  That made me snort a little in amusement. Small licks of flame curled out of my nostrils before dissipating into the air. “At least I didn’t get picky about which rock to possess and insisted on choosing the only pink rock in my hoard. You’re lucky that I even had one.”

  “Yeah well, your hoard is small and you should feel bad about it,” Sixth said testily. Now that caused a flare of irritation inside of me. I understood on an instinctual level that insulting another dragon’s hoard was ‘fighting words’. Sixth seemed to sense that she’d gone too far and apologized immediately. “Wait, no. That was uncalled for. You’ve been spending all of your time hoarding people… right?”

  “... I didn’t exactly plan it that way, but that seems to be what’s happened,” I agreed grumpily after taking a couple of breaths to settle back down. My emotions were more powerful in this place. Controlling them would be a chore. “It would help if someone sat down and actually explained how that works.”

  “Well, you’ve got nothing but time now, so let’s sit down and I’ll tell you what I know. It’s not going to be a lot, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Sixth and I moved away from my core so that she wouldn’t keep getting tugged towards it. The spiraling nexus seemed to regard any foreign source of magic as something to be eaten and processed. Perhaps in the future I could learn to be more selective with what it targeted, but right now it was too overloaded to risk messing with it. We decided to settle by the pool of water, which due to the space’s expansion looked more like a large pond at the moment.

  “Right, so, to review quickly,” Sixth started. “When you hatched early and ran off, you missed out on advantages that the other hatchlings received. The biggest of these, is that all of us were connected to the ‘Dragon Dream’. It is like this Dream Den, but more… pre-prepared. Mine just looked like the nest we were born in, but I never got to develop it much before I was betrayed. Each of those Dreams came with pre-established connections to our siblings’ Dreams.”

  “You mentioned that you were still connected to the others even after… what happened,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Is that where we first met? Your ‘Dragon Dream’?”

  “That was… kind of the ‘meeting point’ between the Dreams of our siblings.” Sixth preened her crests again, in spite of it being entirely unnecessary. Like me, she seemed to fidget with her claws when she was uncomfortable. “We would gather there when we slept, to receive visions that instructed us on what it meant to be a Dragon.”

  “I had always wondered… the rest of our siblings seem to be far more powerful than I am, at least the ones I met.” My tail slapped the surface of the water in frustration. Fear of my siblings attacking and overpowering me had been a long running source of stress in my life. “I thought that maybe they were just favored by our mother…”

  “Sanguine… I don’t know how to tell you this,” Sixth said slowly. She picked and dragged at her crests several times before continuing. “Our mother, or at least the one who laid our eggs, is dead.”

  That news brought me to a halt. I didn’t know how to process it.

  I’d long had an idea in my head, that the one who had birthed me into the world didn’t care about me. A lot of my early choices had been based on the assumption that I’d been abandoned and pushed out of the nest. Indeed, a lot of my thoughts on life in general had been born from the assumption that I could not rely on anyone but myself, right from the beginning.

  My brain creaked as it struggled to adjust to the information. The Dream Space destabilized around us as one of the fundamental pillars of my sense of self was kicked away. Sixth looked around fearfully as the golden spiral wobbled and threatened to spin out of control.

  Slowly, a sense of calm reasserted itself over me.

  As I thought about it… whether it had been intentional or not, I’d been left alone. It may not have been an act of negligence that led to me leaving the nest, but that did not change everything I’d seen and done since then. I’d made innumerable choices in my life based on what I’d known at the time. That the beginning was different than I’d imagined, didn’t change the outcomes.

  “You… you good over there bro’?” Sixth asked nervously. “I thought it might hit you hard… just not… this hard.”

  “Yeah… yeah. I’m ‘good’, Sixth,” I eventually replied. “So if our mother is dead… and was dead, then who taught you all?”

  “That’s… you’re probably going to want to take a breather and center yourself before we get into that,” Sixth said nervously. “You already reacted pretty badly to the first bit of new information. I don’t need your entire Dream destabilizing with me still inside of it.”

  I gave a huff of annoyance at that, but Sixth was probably right… Something else was bothering me though.

  “Have you ever considered choosing a different name?” I asked Sixth as I stood up to slip into the water nearby. It may have been a dream, but the cool liquid helped me to ‘cool off’ a bit, even if it was only to move my body around and tread imagined water. “‘First’ gave you that name, but it doesn’t suit you at all.”

  “A different name?” Sixth seemed to be thrown off balance herself at the sudden change in topic. “I… I’d considered something like that, but not with any real thought. A name is an important thing, not to be shared lightly. You already heard from the humans that you should never give your ‘true’ name to someone else who can use magic. They can use it against you.”

  “Hmm. That’s true,” I mused as I swam around. My tail fanned the water and propelled me in smooth circles. “My Cassia gave me my name. When she did, something ‘clicked’. It changed something about me.” I looked up and down Sixth’s pink colored scales. “First might be using how he named you to control you, if that thing about names is true.”

  “... What about ‘Morgan’? After the pink crystal you possessed, morganite?”

  My sibling blinked as something abruptly ‘clicked’ inside of her soul, causing her to vanish.

  The adolescent representation of herself fell apart back into a shining ball of pink light. I could tell that she was agitated from the way that the ball whipped around and made a series of indistinct buzzing chimes. It took her a good couple of minutes to calm down again.

  When she did, my sister Morgan lashed out the moment she’d reformed. Her tail caught the edge of the water and sent a wave splashing over me. She did this several more times before she jumped in herself and attempted to use her smaller form to dunk my head under the water.

  “Idiot! Moron! Fool!” she howled as she repeatedly jumped up and down on top of my head. Ultimately, it was still a Dream. I couldn’t drown here, but it wasn’t pleasant to repeatedly get your head dunked by your ‘younger’ sibling. “I’m bloody stuck with that crystal now! I can feel it in my core! You absolute bastard!”

  She was obviously fuming even as I eventually reached up to scruff her by the back of her crested neck with my claws. In spite of her evident fury, I could still detect a hint of poorly disguised joy brimming up inside of her. Something about getting a new name, especially one that resonated with her (in spite of her objections), had solidified her soul in a way that spoon feeding her power couldn’t replicate.

  Hopefully that didn’t complicate our discussion too much.