That afternoon, Koben and Captain Esmor were at Gunu’s side when the Aeriemaster came to the kitchen to check in with Leslyn. The prince for once forewent his usual back-slap greeting, for Leslyn proudly carried his tiny swaddled keet to show them the progress that had been made. Valiant constantly vacillated between sleep and waking, but for the moment, he was alert, and able to recognize that there were new faces all around him with long, curious gazes toward each.

“I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen for myself,” Esmor said, absently scratching a sideburned cheek. “It looked like it was just hours from fading away last night.”

“He’s decided he wants to live,” was Leslyn’s firm reply.

“Thanks to your efforts,” the Aeriemaster said, equally firmly.

“You’ve done well, squire,” Koben said warmly. “I knew it was right to offer you the chance of a keet.”

Koben’s words triggered the memory of something Kaleit had said earlier that day. “Sire, about my lack of citizenship… was it really right for me to—”

Both Koben and Gunu cut him off, their words blending together incoherently. The prince nodded to Gunu, allowing him to speak first.

“This is about something much bigger than citizenship,” the Aeriemaster said. “And you needn’t worry. There are more than enough of us who would vouch for you when the time comes.”

“You’d need citizenship if you were to join the Guard,” Esmor said thoughtfully, “however, your career would be emphatically short. It seems unlikely that the keet could ever grow large enough to carry you.”

Tannoran had implied something similar of the keet before, ignoring his son’s attempt at humor and warning Kaleit that receiving the wind-egger would lead to him kissing his place in the Guard goodbye. Leslyn looked askance at the Aeriemaster and prince, suddenly fearing this truth in his heart.

“It’s possible he could grow,” Gunu said, but he didn’t sound as convinced as the youth would have hoped.

“Perhaps it is possible, for an upstanding young man of your stature.” The implication of Koben’s cheerful suggestion was quite clear to Leslyn, as the blond man’s large palm descended upon his head and lightly ruffled his hair.

Leslyn shoved his hand away automatically, as if it were something he’d been doing for years. “Leave off… sire, if you please,” he quickly added, but the heat of a familiar ire had already risen to his ears.

“That’s an interesting shade of red,” Gunu noted.

Koben just laughed. “Apologies, dear squire. I’ll refrain from further disturbing that particular thorn in your side.”

Even this far away from home, he still found a way to get under Leslyn’s skin. He shifted Valiant to the other arm and cupped an angry red ear with his free hand, willing it to cool.

In the moment of silence, Captain Esmor turned to the prince. “Ah, Koben. I meant to tell you that Goma Gomok was sighted earlier this morning. He’s landed somewhere on the eastern end of the continent, as we expected he would.”

“Don’t the werelings worship him?” Leslyn piped up, forgetting for the moment that he was offended. It wasn’t often he heard news about the dragon when he was back in Gerrit.

Koben shrugged. “Not in the sense that they believe he’s a god, but they certainly bestow great honor upon him. He’s hundreds, maybe thousands of years old.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“I’ll take my leave,” Esmor sighed, “I’ve already heard enough about that stupid worm for today, thanks to those babbling scouts.” He turned to go. “Oh, hello, Tannoran. You look like you’re in a hurry.”

Tannoran had paused in the doorway, his lip curled as he took in the sight of Leslyn and his much-improved keet. Like son, like father, he thought.

“Has anyone seen Kaleit? I’ve not laid an eye on him since the assigning.”

At their gestures or brief words to the negative, the captain nodded and left to continue his search. Esmor followed, leaving Leslyn and Valiant with the Aeriemaster and prince.

“Leslyn, with me,” said Koben. “We’re going out for a bit.”

“But sire, what about—”

“I’ll stay with Valiant,” Gunu interrupted. “He’s well enough that you can safely resume some of your duties.”

With obvious hesitancy, Leslyn turned his keet over to the Aeriemaster and went outside with Koben, looking back over his shoulder toward the Aerie often enough that the prince couldn’t help but laugh when he noticed. From there, they took Romo to the sky in an easterly direction.

At last, they landed on a high hillock that gave them a vast view of the eastern limits of Nilvar’s mainland. Leslyn had been growing more and more hopeful of what Koben’s intent would be, and when he looked down and saw the titanic form in the valley below, he was not disappointed.

In a meadow hedged in by a grove of conifer trees, Goma Gomok lay on his side in the long grass with feline abandon, his elongated neck and tail curled about the edges of a pond to form a nearly complete loop around it with his own body, one of four long-clawed paws lazily batting at the cool water. Red fur covered his skin from head to toe, a longer, thicker mane building along the crest of his neck like a wave, breaking at his shoulders to leave a relatively bare back, and reforming again to ornament his tail. His face was whiskered, and something between that of a cat and that of a wolf.

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The dragon appeared small at first glance from that distance, but when he rolled onto his back to stretch, his tail swept across the ground and casually took several trees with it. Rising to a more upright pose with front paws crossed in front of his chest and hind legs stretched out to the side, he folded bat-like wings neatly over his back. He lifted his head in a graceful, swannish manner to look above the trees toward the seasonally-warped ocean horizon, where the entire crystalline circumference of Crylis was now visible above the distant line, bowing the division between sea and sky upward toward himself as if by force of magic.

Goma Gomok was as big as the rumors promised.

After already coming face to face with a creature as impossibly large as the griffin Wrath, Leslyn could barely comprehend the dragon’s true scale. There was just no comparison. A primal dread chilled his blood at the thought of the titan suddenly turning and looking at him, yet he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

When Koben started speaking in a normal tone, Leslyn gasped so loudly and suddenly that he startled Romo into growling and flaring his wings.

“Now that that’s settled, I was just informing you that Goma Gomok is a curious fellow, likely here to check up on the Queen after her last voyage,” Koben repeated, an amused look on his face. “He’ll make his way closer to Nilvar when he’s ready to chat, but never too close.”

“That’s kind of him,” Leslyn managed to get out, clutching his own chest. His heart was pounding so hard that he was beginning to feel faint.

“It happens to everyone the first time they see him,” the prince said of the dragon. “But not to worry. Anyone brave enough to approach Goma Gomok is welcomed warmly and treated to fascinating conversations about far distant continents.”

The boy couldn’t help but picture himself standing in front of the dragon, but try as he might, he couldn’t imagine anything as pleasant as a story coming out of the creature’s distinctly predatory mouth. “H-Have you ever…?”

“Of course I have. The first was about ten years ago. I would like to say I strode boldly toward him and then back to the city afterward, but, truthfully, the only reason I did get home was because I sat upon Romo’s obliging back when my legs gave out—and you took the whole encounter in stride, my friend.” He reached up and scratched the red griffin’s shoulder fondly. “I’d wager you’re still braver than I am, even after all the adventures we’ve been through.”

With a fluctuating rumble that sounded remarkably like a deep-chested laugh, Romo gave the blond man an equally fond nudge of his beak to the chest, just shy of knocking Koben over. Koben wrapped his arms around that big beak in a hug, and Romo lifted him clear off the ground, ears pricked forward with delight.

The sight warmed Leslyn for a happy moment, but just as quickly, the cold dread returned. Not because of the dragon, but because Valiant’s grotesque little face had just flashed through his mind. Would the yellow keet ever be able to do as Romo just did, easily lifting his rider as if he were light as a feather? What other unexpected and disappointing limitations would they face, if the keet did live to maturity? Would they ever fl—

“I’ve found that a head is a terrible place to reside, dear squire.”

Koben’s cheerful voice instantly wrenched Leslyn back to the external world. He sighed, looking back down at Goma Gomok. The fresh hit of primal terror did wonders to take his mind off of the keet.

“You were saying earlier that he can fly out to faraway continents?”

“That he can, Leslyn.”

“So why doesn’t he take anyone with him? He looks like he could carry whole shiploads of people, and I can’t imagine that anything would dare attack him during the flight, no matter how far they went.”

The prince laughed, and Leslyn instinctively stiffened in preparation for the back slap that came a moment later. “If you wish to be the first to suggest that he become a ferry for the little field mice that we are to him, you can be my guest.”

Below, Goma Gomok yawned with a thundering boom, leathery wings stretching out like windblown sails on a boat that had been built for giants. His talons extended to a fearsome length and then retracted, digging deep grooves in the ground that instantly began filling with pond water. Those ditches would have taken hours for a man to dig them all by hand.

Leslyn ducked and looked away as the fear struck him again, sparing only one more meek sidewards glance toward the dragon. “Some sort of payment, then? A tithe of the city’s meat supply, maybe?”

“If he’d accept any form of tribute, I’d have given whatever he asked long ago if he’d agreed to carry the Queen afar to seek out her remaining knights.”

“Really?” Leslyn was of the mind that there were no knights left to find, save the loyal lion, the one that always seemed to return to Emerrane with her. That was Katharesa’s wereling companion Teryn, no doubt.

Koben met his incredulous look with an unusually soft smile. “I certainly would. I fancied myself knight material when I was your age, but even as the child she was when I offered, Katharesa knew my role in her quest would be something otherwise. It was actually Goma Gomok who reckoned what it might be. Thus far it’s not been what I expected, but I’m starting to make some sense of it.”

“What is your role, then?”

“It seems I am a huntsman of sorts. I seek out what she needs and provide it for her, be it an item, transportation, or simply a willing ear to bend.”

“I see.” Leslyn slipped into his thoughts for a few moments, and came back to himself gazing at Romo, who seemed confused by his apparently too-long stare. “I always thought it was odd.”

“What was odd, dear squire?”

“Her coming in our generation. In the beginning it was the Great Quake, then later the breaking of Crylis, then after that came the floods, starvation and slow extinction of Emerrane’s beastkinds, and eventually the war with the merlings. There was no new calamity to prompt her appearance this time. How can that be?”

“I say that there are already so many unresolved calamities that she doesn’t need something new to draw her back to Emerrane.”

“That does make sense, I suppose, but there’s still one thing: Why didn’t Ardor plan for this? The Queen was supposed return, gather her knights, and reverse the calamities as they happened, but when she failed to save Crylis he didn’t give her a way to get to the knights when the floods began afterward—if they’re even coming back here for her to find at all.” He gestured down toward the valley. “It would be a simple matter if Goma Gomok flew her straight to where she sensed her knights, if they’re here. He’d be the perfect solution.”

“That he would be, but the Queen’s journey was never meant to be an easy one. The onus is on us to find another way—just as we wished.”

“I can’t see how,” Leslyn scoffed, giving the dragon below another timid, but wistful glance. “Not unless we can convince the merlings to let us cross the arbitrary borders they’ve set and caged us in with.”

The prince chuckled and swung a broad palm smack into the boy’s shoulder blades. “That’s a very interesting idea, dear squire. You never know what might be possible, if the circumstances were just right…”