Serenity floated in darkness. It was peaceful, but not somewhere he wanted to be. He wanted to be with his parents; that was the point of this trip.
He wished his father had waited for him to return to Earth; it was difficult to protect people who left without you. Serenity hadn’t worried at the time, but the longer it was since his parents disappeared, the more worried he became. They weren’t safe, not when they’d been out of contact for a month.
Serenity had no idea how much food they’d carried; several days’ worth seemed likely, but weeks was not. It simply took too much space and weight. They hadn’t expected to be gone that long. Serenity was carrying that much, but it was in his Rift; as far as he knew, neither of his parents had a similar storage Skill.
Serenity was still thinking about his parents when the darkness around him shifted and became a library. It was oddly tall; everything was a bit bigger than he thought it should be. It was larger than the Great Library seemed when he was in wyrmling form.
Which, now that he thought about it, he was. How strange.
Everything was still far too large.
“A dragon? No, you’re far too small. A very young dragon, perhaps?” A young man spoke behind Serenity. He sounded curious, almost intrigued.
Serenity whipped around to look at him. The man fit the library, taller than a human. If Serenity had to guess, he was probably over eight feet in height, though he appeared quite slender. He was humanoid, but the more Serenity looked at him the less human he seemed.
His face was shaped wrong, too slender and with a pair of bone ridges that culminated in horns that reminded Serenity of his own as a Greater Wrath Demon. His chest was oddly broad for his otherwise thin features, like it held additional muscles. Wings would explain it, but Serenity couldn’t see any wings. His hands ended in sharp, claw-like nails; he wore a glove on his right hand to protect the books.
In some ways, the most normal thing about him was his coloration, pale skin with purple eyes, hair, and claws. The shade wasn’t quite the same as Serenity’s, but it was fairly close. Serenity suspected that at least half the reason it seemed normal to him was that he saw something similar in the mirror.
Serenity didn’t recognize the species offhand. That didn’t mean much; humanoid species were common, probably because freeing a pair of hands to do more detailed work was exceedingly useful. The one thing it did mean was that the man, whatever his species was, didn’t come from anywhere close to Earth.
“How did you get here? I thought all of the Wells were long since blocked off. The only people who’ve come through since I did were a couple I apparently led here. You’re far too quick after them.” The man babbled quickly, almost tripping over his own words. “How did you get here? How did you get in? How did you know how to try?”
Serenity would have put a hand up to tell the man to slow down if he’d been in any of his humanoid forms. It didn’t have the same impact from a quadruped, since the man kept talking. Serenity raised a wing and flapped it. The air movement finally attracted the man’s attention and got him to stop. “My father told me how to find the pyramid. Who are you?”
“Your father?” The strange young man facing Serenity sounded startled. “How would a dragon know how to find … wait. You’re not really a dragon, are you? Any more than this is really the Clan Library or than I’m really a fullblood. Who is your father?”
“I am a dragon.” Serenity growled at the other man. He wasn’t going to put up with the other man denying that particular truth. “And I already told you, I know because my father told me.” Serenity paused for a moment and re-ran the man’s statement through his head. “He’s not a dragon.”
The other man stared down at him for a moment, then started laughing.
It wasn’t funny! Serenity had simply told the truth!
“All right,” the other man agreed with a grin before he settled into a nearby chair. “Your father’s not a dragon and he’s the one who told you where this place is. And how did he know himself?”
“Because you left me a letter, of course.” Lex answered the question before Serenity saw that he’d appeared. He stepped out from behind a shelf. He seemed translucent; Serenity could make out the shelf and the books that were on it easier than he could discern his father. “I suppose I should have told you he might come; I didn’t think about it.”
“Dad?” Serenity stared at the ghost of his father in shock. “What happened to you? Is Mother … is she also …?”
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Lex grinned at Serenity. “As far as I know, both she and I are fine. I’m not here any more than your great-grandfather is.” Lex waved a hand dismissively at the young man who’d been questioning Serenity. “From what Grandfather tells me, people who travel through the Well of Souls leave an echo behind. It’s one of the things that makes travel using them dangerous. The other is that … well, you don’t get to pick where you come out. Grandfather had never even heard of Earth; he simply wanted a way out of a bad situation and had no better way to run. I have no idea where the real me is now.”
Serenity growled again. It was great to hear that his parents were safe after all, but hearing that there was no guarantee he’d come out at the same place his parents had was awful. There wasn’t even a guarantee that they were together, or that he’d arrive in the same place Blaze did!
“I thought it would be a way back home,” the other man - Great-grandfather Timothy? - stated. “I still think it might be, but I’ve had a lot of time to find out about the echoes that are here, and there are echoes from places I’ve never heard of that aren’t your Earth. In fact, I don’t think I’ve met any from Earth other than my grandson and his wife. You as well, I suppose.” The young man huffed. “A great-grandchild, at my age! Or for that matter at all. The elders would be so angry…”
The thought seemed to make Timothy happy, if the smile on his face was any indication.
Serenity found that he really didn’t care. Whoever his great-grandfather’s elders had once been didn’t matter to him, which made their opinions truly irrelevant. They’d never caught up with Vengeance, so it seemed likely they’d never bother Serenity. What actually mattered was catching up to his parents; if he could get to them, maybe he could get them out of whatever difficulty had kept them from contracting him.
“How did you leave?” Serenity looked around the library without seeing any possible way to direct where he went. There wasn’t even a sign that he was moving.
“The brooch,” Lex said. “I paid attention to it and sort of pushed in the direction I wanted. Which was just out, I’m afraid. Nowhere specific.”
Serenity frowned. That definitely took one of the better possibilities away. “That’s probably how I got here, then. I was thinking of you and Mom.”
Lex followed Serenity’s thoughts accurately, if a little slower. “Thinking of us? Oh, because you were trying to find us. And whatever this space is decided that we were as close to what you were thinking of as any other option, so it brought you to us whether or not that was where you’d have headed otherwise.”
“Yeah,” Serenity frowned. Another glance at his great-grandfather’s echo changed the question he wanted to ask. “How did you manage on Earth? Can you shapeshift too?”
Timothy laughed at the question. “No. If you’re a relative-” He glanced towards Lex, who nodded. Timothy shrugged. “I’m more than half human myself. All Suras are, these days; the days when you could tell the Clan from outsiders at a glance are long gone. It wouldn’t take more than minor illusions to hide in a human population, and I came prepared to do that. Humans are immensely more common than Suras. I am lucky that it’s a human world I landed on, but I assumed that if I landed on an nonhuman world, I’d be able to buy transportation to a human world. I didn’t really think the Well would do more than take me to another part of Suratiz. That would have been enough.”
Suratiz didn’t ring a bell for Serenity either, but he supposed that Timothy’s explanation said why he didn’t recognize the “Sura” species. It surprised Serenity only a little to learn of a species that had apparently been wiped out by interbreeding; that was where the different bloodlines came from, after all. It was a bit unusual for the original species to vanish, but it certainly wasn’t unknown.
At least he had an explanation, even if it did open up some questions about Serenity’s own genetic background. It probably didn’t make him all that much different from other Earthlings, really, other than the fact that he knew where it came from.
He was going to have to tell his father about this conversation, wasn’t he? He’d probably have to help his father find Suratiz, too. At least he could try to put that off until it was safe; if he was deliberately going offworld, surely Lex would agree to take some protectors with him.
Which brought up another question. “In the letter you gave my father, you said that he should be careful, something about him being the real heir but that being too dangerous to admit.” Serenity had the actual words but wasn’t certain he should repeat them exactly. “Just how dangerous is the threat?”
Great-grandfather Timothy seemed surprised by the question. “You wouldn’t know, would you? The Et’Tart lineage produces most of the Sura mages on Suratiz. There aren’t that many each generation, but Suras live far longer than humans, even with Tiers.” He bit his lip and looked down. “If I truly wanted to fight for leadership, I’d have needed to convince the Elder that others were trying to steal it from me; he mostly leaves that to the younger generations and I … I didn’t care. He’s as strong as anyone on the planet, stronger even than the Lord, though not as strong as the Lost Gods. Tier eight, maybe ten or eleven? I’m not sure. I know Rakiton, the man leading the man who kept trying to arrange accidents for me, was Tier Seven. No idea what they are now.”
Serenity closed his eyes for a moment. That was not a particularly useful range, because it wasn’t immediately clear if he could deal with them or not. They were definitely past the first common bottleneck, but that was all Serenity could say for sure. Of course, there was a good chance they weren’t around anymore; Serenity didn’t know when Timothy came to Earth, but it had to be more than a century earlier. That was long enough for things to change but not long enough to be certain they had. “Tell me the whole story. From the beginning, please, in lots of detail. I want to know who and what to watch out for if we go to Suratiz. Anything else you can tell me about the planet would be good, too.”
“Planet?” Timothy sounded surprised. “Suratiz isn’t a planet. It’s a moon. The moon of the Suras’ original planet; my ancestors fled there after…”