As they fled from the scene of the battle, Fia, Viliant, and Diwa did not look back. A shadow passed overhead in the shape of another dragon. Fright flooded through Fia, assuming that the brown dragoness had given chase on behalf of her human masters.

Diwa let out a savage snarl, but when she turned to fight in defense of the dragonets, the protective growl died in her throat. No longer bound to silence by the nearby belligerent humans, Diwa whistled aloud, "Roki!"

Fia and Viliant turned to see Sage Rokirith on a quick descent through the sky. He made it! Fia's blue eyes sparkled up to the dark gray wings framed by the cloudless sky. How? she wondered. Even a child's imagination could not dream how he had managed to fight his way back out of the chasm. That did not matter. A true flying ace could do anything, in Fia's eyes. She joined Diwa in her joculous cheer. "Sage Rokirith! You did it!"

The sage's remarkable feat did nothing to change his reputation in Viliant's ill-tempered mind. Silent, the black dragonet withheld the cause for his perturbation. He deemed it an inappropriate time to express any ridicule, but his general mood still slipped through their telepathic connection. He was lucky that Diwa was too preoccupied to inquire into his seemingly misplaced emotions.

As she eagerly waited for Sage Rokirith to land in front of them, Diwa titled her head back and ruffled her open wings. Fia jumped up and down beside her, yet despite their celebration, they did not seem to catch Sage Rokirith's attention. He shot overhead, soaring at a rapid pace but veering at a gradual decline.

His balance careened to either side. Even as Sage Rokirith drew nearer to the ground, he did not slow down or angle his wings to land as he should have. The base of his tail thrashed about, but it looked shorter than it usually did. His attempts to rudder the air were rendered ineffective. Oh no, Fia thought. He's going to crash!

The sage made no effort to stick a landing on his claws. Instead, he threw his weight to the side and sponged his fall with his side. His left wing folded beneath himself and scraped across the sharp ground. Some rock cracked and groaned under the impact of his weight. A sharper grunt from Sage Rokirith peeled above the ruckus of his landing. A cloud of dust drifted around the sage's gray body, concealing him from view. He almost appeared as though he could have turned to stone, an unmoving boulder at the center of the hazy plume.

"Rokirith!" Diwa cried, running to be the first to arrive at his side.

Fia dashed after her, lastly followed by Viliant. The black dragonet stood behind Fia, keeping the most distance from Sage Rokirith. His green eyes flitted in a frenzy between the sage and the direction from where he had flown, back to the human army beyond their sight.

The airborne grit settled, and the injured state of Sage Rokirith was revealed. His side rose and fell with labored, painful breaths. One wing sprawled askew over his body. As he stirred, slowly moving as if to assess the new damage to his person, Sage Rokirith peeled back his uninjured wing. This unveiled the condition of his tail, the majority lost to the gruesome battle.

A raw gasp sliced down her throat like razors had entered Fia's windpipe. Though she had seen death—fighting for her life in the coliseum, and witnessing her best friend slaughter humans—nothing quite compared to this. Even her old shoulder wound, a chunk of flesh ripped away by a gravity orb, had enough healthy muscles around it for Diwa to heal the gaping wound. In contrast, the Dragon Slayer had dismembered a crucial part of any dragon's mobility. While a dragon had four legs, Sage Rokirith had lost his one and only tail.

In his forelegs, curled close to his chest and cushioned by his broken wing, Sage Rokirith cherished a brown egg. Before the dragon egg could smash against the canyon floor and spawn a thousand demons, the great sage had reclaimed it.

Up close, Fia's mouth pursed slightly ajar as her eyes lifted agog. The pink dragonette now scolded herself in hindsight, guilty and foolhardy, for thinking that Sage Rokirith would ever have let her die at the oasis. He's really a hero. Champion of the Bad Land.

While the dragonets stood stock-still off to the side, Diwa rushed to the limp residual of his tail. The healer immediately charged her most powerful spell.

The sage floundered across the ground and managed to bump Diwa in the chin with his heel, claws curled to shield her against an accidental nick. "Save your magic for where it's needed most!"

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Diwa shrilled back at him between her clenched fangs, "I need to heal your tail right now!" She started preparing the spell again, but Sage Rokirith lumbered to swing his hindquarters around, tucking his residual tail beneath his abdomen.

"What tail?" the sage hissed vehemently. "Leave it."

"If I don't do something now, I might never be able to regrow it—"

Insistent, Sage Rokirith redirected her attention to a more vulnerable victim. "The egg! Check the egg! Their diabolic magic hasn't ruined it yet, has it?"

As they spoke, veins of a blackish color rippled across its rigged surface. The egg gained a pattern like snakeskin. The evil magic pulsed, ready to consume the egg.

Diwa hesitated momentarily, inert like the dragonets. Her only movement was an anxious twitch to her claws. As badly as she might long to reward the sage's selfless sacrifice and restore him to his previous condition, she must weigh the priority of her patients. Diwa had no other virtuous choice but to heed his request. She released her spell on the egg.

Slowly, she lowered her belly to the ground and stretched her nose out to her patient. Diwa's nostrils twitched, as if the nature mage could smell whether or not something had gone amiss with the egg inside. "The baby is fine."

A sigh of relief soughed past Sage Rokirith's maw, as though the confirmation from Diwa knocked the wind out of him even more than the collision.

"You can feel it, too, can't you?" she remarked so that the sage could verify it for himself.

As Fia overheard this exchange, she ventured outside her familiar telepathic network with Viliant, Diwa, and Sage Rokirith. In doing so, she also took a half-step closer to the brown and black-mottled egg. Fia prodded it to see if the dragon inside would be capable of telepathic engagement. Already, a concept of self had cultivated in the baby dragonette—unhatched but fully developed.

Hi? squeaked the new presence in her mind.

She's a little girl, Fia observed, like me. Her snout stretched out, and she edged her claws a bit closer to join Diwa and Sage Rokirith with the egg.

Curious? The brown dragonette in the egg wondered at the newcomer in her headspace. She speedily decided that she liked Fia. Happy!

The uninhibited presence of the unhatched dragonette made Fia flinch, stumbling backward into Viliant.

Watch it, he spat and shoved Fia back. Viliant refocused his eyes on the empty horizon, flicking his tail with greater agitation. With Diwa engrossed by Sage Rokirith's wounds, the black dragonet adopted the role as sentinel.

Fia knew that she ought to stand guard beside him. Nevertheless, the strong emotions from the baby dragonette scattered her thoughts.

Sad! The baby dragonette became crestfallen as quickly as she had taken to Fia.

Oh no! I'm sorry! The older dragonette had never intended to hurt the baby's feelings when she had withdrawn abruptly. Fia's attention shot upward, frantically looking to the adults to help smooth over her introduction with the unhatched dragonette.

All this happened as Diwa importuned Sage Rokirith to uncurl his tail. "Let me heal your tail!" she screeched. "I know you like to keep your scars. Rest assured. It will scar well enough."

"Heal my wing," he spoke back. The sage shifted his weight and pulled out the limp, leathery flap from beneath his body with a wince. Though Fia could not understand every word, she did hold onto the calm and authoritative tone of Sage Rokirith's voice, even if a bit haggard. "I sprained it during the landing, but we must fly again." The sage leaned to the side to splay his crooked wing with fresh tatters in the leathery flap.

This revelation finally earned Viliant's attention, his gaze lingering at the slits of light formed by the rips.

First, Diwa pulled Sage Rokirith's wing into the proper position. Then, her healing magic emanated in a feeble flow. Despite how tightly she clenched her jaw, drool slipped between her fangs. The light of her spell wavered as she tried harder to concentrate. The minor tears of his wings melded over while the bones still needed to straighten into form.

Just like that…. Viliant grumbled as he watched from afar. However, no one paid him any heed at this moment.

Sage Rokirith looked around Diwa's wide, incensed stance to regard Fia. "Won't you be a dear and help Diwa? Fia, you can fix my tail."

"Me?" Fia had not the slightest inkling how she could begin to ameliorate such a grave wound.

Sage Rokirith gazed at her. His typical, self-assured posture slouched under the agony that he must endure. "I'm waiting," he said, expecting Fia to do something about it.