Kaz reached deep into a crevice partially hidden by a spindly group of dark brown mushrooms with bright green gills, trying not to break any as he did so. The Copperstriker gatherers had done a good job cutting out the largest ones and leaving just enough so the fungus could recover quickly, and he would feel bad if he wasted their hard work.

When he felt his fingers brush against leather, he smiled before tugging it out, lifting the battered remains of his old pack up over the rougu. Li flapped her wings, buffeting his ear until he absently tilted his head away from her as she rose into the air. He was used to it by now, and had given up chastising her for not moving further down his arm before taking off.

Kaz settled the old pack onto the floor, wrinkling his nose against the stench of mold and rot that rose up from it. Li landed a safe distance away, mantling and hissing at the offensive object.

He gave her a look. “It’s at least partially your fault it’s like this. You’re not particularly tidy when you eat.”

The little dragon huffed, a hint of white swirling into her golden eyes. A picture of himself stuffing some unidentifiable object into the pack appeared in his head. Inside, a beautiful golden dragon took dainty bites, but was unable to avoid smearing the remains everywhere because of the tight space she was in.

Kaz gingerly opened the pack, though he had to use his new stone knife to cut the tangled cord. As he did, two stone slivers broke away from the damaged hilt, leaving a piece too thin to grip easily, and Kaz sighed in disappointment as he set it aside. The good thing about stone was that it chipped easily, making it relatively simple to craft a sharp blade from it once you got the hang of it. The bad thing about stone was that it chipped easily, making it vulnerable to breakage when its user did something like drop it on the rocky ground, as Kaz had.

Reaching into the pack, he pulled out his firestriker, turning it in front of Li’s nose so she could see the tiny scratches left by sharp little teeth. After that came the once-fine leather bag that had contained the knife and hilt his aunt Rega had given him right before she died. Kaz poked a finger through a gaping hole that looked torn as much as cut.

“You also ate everything I had in here, including my chalk, firemoss, and rations.”

Li clicked at him before reaching out a small talon and poking at a rusty stain on the bag.

Kaz sighed. “Yes, all right, I bled all over everything, too. Still, you have to admit you were at least partially responsible.”

The dragon glanced away, sending him a last image of a blue kobold sliding down a long tunnel, his pack snagging on a hundred sharp stones and finally ripping free, before landing in a pool of slime.

Giving up, Kaz just shook his head and laid down the bag and firestriker, ignoring the glint of metal from inside the pouch for the moment. There was only one more thing in the bedraggled pack that he cared about.

The seed.

His fingers closed around a hard object about a fifth of the size of his palm, and he pulled it out, examining its wrinkled brown surface. It was ovoid, but both ends were far more pointed than any egg had a right to be. It was marked with narrow grooves left by Li’s teeth and a slightly larger one left by Kaz’s claw, but it was hard enough that it remained otherwise intact, in spite of the harsh treatment the pack had undergone. Kaz actually thought it was some kind of particularly soft stone until Lianhua had told him it was something called a ‘seed’, though she hadn’t actually given him any more explanation than that.

Besides its strange appearance, there was one more thing that made the seed special; Kaz could use it as a repository for his excess power. When he was close to it, he could send a great deal of his golden ki through the link between his core and the seed, reducing the strain on his channels and preventing his ki from overflowing into his body. If he had had it in his possession the day before, he might not have needed to compress his ki, since he could instead have just poured the power that threatened to break his already cracked core into it.

Reminded, he ‘looked’ at the whole, albeit layered, core that rested deep in his abdomen. He felt much better than he had since his core almost shattered after he forced far too much power out of it at once, but he was still very uncomfortable when he thought about the strange being he had spoken to after he managed to compress his ki.

Li had been holding his core together at the time, and Kaz felt a deep unease at having drawn the attention of something so powerful to not only himself, but his friend. He was almost certain that when Li ran out of power, Kaz would have died without the stranger’s intervention. Unfortunately, the old male hadn’t seemed particularly interested in Kaz until he noticed Li’s shell of ki, at which point he repaired Kaz’s core as if doing something that should have been impossible took less effort than breathing.

Something tugged at Kaz’s fingers, and he looked down to see the very dragon about whom he had just been worrying. She was gnawing at the seed, her sharp teeth trying to get enough of a grip to pull it from his hand.

Kaz yanked it back, closing his fingers around it tightly. “No! I still need it, and besides, I don’t know what would happen to either of us if you ate it.”

Li sent him an image of herself swallowing the seed whole, then filling with power until she swelled into a much larger, and very self-satisfied, version of herself.

He rolled his eyes, returning a vision of the seed becoming lodged in her long, thin throat so he had to try to fish it out with a claw. Again.

The dragon puffed a little breath, eyes narrowing as she stared at his closed fist. Finally, she turned away, focusing on the ragged and filthy bag containing the knife and hilt.

Kaz set the seed down, far enough away that she couldn’t snatch it, absently noting that as he pulled his hand away, the link between him and it grew again, stretching out and then firming into a glimmering line of light half again as large as it had been before. A good part of the gold portion of his ki flowed down this tributary happily enough, vanishing into the capacious depths of the seed, where a minute spark of light hung. Still, that wasn’t entirely unexpected, since every time he grew stronger, it seemed like his links to Li and the seed did as well, so he just ignored it for the moment, turning to the knives instead.

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Picking up the strangely layered blade Rega said had belonged to his father, Ghazt, Kaz turned it so it caught the light of the glowing orb hovering above his shoulder. He had only recently learned how to make one of the flickering spheres, and though he could see well enough to get around using only his ki-strengthened vision, he enjoyed being able to do it again, after having lost the ability while his core was damaged.

The weapon gleamed, as beautiful as it was when he first saw it, though he’d used it many times during the week he spent lost in the between-areas. It was sharp enough to cut through bone, though its tip was covered in a carved blue stone. Kaz wasn’t sure what kept the stone in place, or why a spark of ki arced between it and the blade whenever it was removed, but he never felt quite right until he replaced it, so most of the time he only used it for slashing and slicing, rather than stabbing.

The shabby hilt, on the other hand, held only a sheared-off stump of a blade, the unknown metal bearing waves and whorls like the whole one, while still being all but useless. The edges were still sharp, but the piece remaining was so short it could barely cut anything.

Picking it up in his free hand, Kaz looked between it and the stone knife Pilla, the chief of the Copperstrikers, had given him. Kaz had made several small stone gathering blades in his life, and the hilts were usually wrapped with leather like that of the broken knife. He wondered what was beneath the worn strips, and if he could use whatever was left to add a proper hilt to the stone weapon, replacing the broken parts of two weapons in order to make one functional one.

Otherwise, he would need to make a whole new knife, since the stone one wasn’t really usable without a way to hold it, and he couldn’t reveal his father’s blade. It was far too fine for him to own, and there would be questions, even if none of the humans with whom he was traveling decided to take it from him. Gaoda certainly wasn’t above doing exactly that, for no other reason than because he could.

Shaking his head, Kaz unbuckled his new pack and pulled it around, taking out his old fur loincloth. It wasn’t in good shape, but it didn’t stink, and it wasn’t moldy, so it was a significant improvement over the crusty and torn bag. He cut a small piece of it off before rolling the good knife and the broken one up in the larger chunk. The remnant was used to carefully wrap his fire-striker, and then Kaz tucked both bundles into the pack, followed by the seed.

That done, he climbed to his paws and shoved the noisome remains of his old pack back into the crevice without an ounce of regret. It had served its purpose well, but there was nothing special about it, and now it was almost revolting.

Finally, he stooped and picked up the stone knife, handling it carefully as he put it back in his belt. The hilt might be broken, but it was still better than nothing. He would find a time to unwrap the hilt Rega had given him and see if it was possible to combine the two parts or not.

Li stared after him as he began to move away through the cavern, and finally gave a sharp, demanding whistle, accompanied by an image of a blue kobold turning around right now to go back and fetch the lovely dragon on the floor.

He looked back at her. “You need to practice flying more. Now that we’re back with the humans, you’ll have to pretend to be a fuergar all the time, which means no wings. You don’t want to forget how, do you?”

A deep sense of horror flooded him through their bond, and Kaz barely managed to keep a straight face as Li flapped her wings, lifting easily from the ground and swooping gracefully after him. She circled his head several times, clicking and whistling, and he silently reassured her that he didn’t really think she could forget something as instinctive as flight.

Kaz thinned his mental image of bright sheaths formed of ki around his channels, and power filled his body. He had to make sure that he didn’t let it go completely, because the ki would then pool in some areas, while leaving others all but empty, reducing him to a twitching puddle of fur on the ground. Still, so long as he adjusted it correctly, which was becoming easier and easier, he could make his muscles and senses far more powerful than they had ever been before, without losing anything that mattered.

Strong legs carried him through the winding tunnels of the Copperstriker’s territory, while his empowered nose and ears were ready to catch even the slightest smell or sound of anyone nearby. He avoided a group of young gatherers and their guards, then caught the scent of Baji and Mik, the two male kobolds Pilla had assigned to guide the humans to the stairs that led down into the mid-levels of the mountain.

Kaz had slipped away from the group almost as soon as they were out of the den, after giving Lianhua a subtle little wave. He was sure Chi Yincang had noticed when he left as well, and it was always hard to tell exactly what Raff did and didn’t see. Gaoda almost certainly hadn’t, though, and Kaz amused himself by imagining the look of offended surprise on the human’s face when he realized that his kobold guide was gone again.

Still, if Baji and Mik were coming back, that meant they had completed their task, and Kaz needed to hurry. He banished his light orb before allowing a bit more ki into his legs, though he felt his arms weaken a little as he did so. This allowed him to move so quickly that he could hear the air whistle past his ears, and soon he stopped just outside the entrance to the cavern that held the stairs.

Tried to stop, anyway. The claws he’d clipped to reduce noise scrabbled uselessly at the rock beneath his paws as he attempted to halt his forward momentum. He slipped, slid, and his drained arms failed to catch him when he put them out ahead of him, causing him to enter the cave tumbling painfully head over tail.

When he finally came to a complete stop, he was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling high overhead. All of the stalactites there had been broken off, of course, but the stumps spun dizzily in his vision.

Something small but heavy thumped onto his belly, and he grunted. Li scampered up to peer into his eyes, clicking worriedly. He sent her reassurance as he tried to recover enough to get up. Before he could, however, a pale, furless hand extended into his vision, and an equally bald, flat face looked down at him.

Lianhua’s amethyst eyes were concerned, but Raff’s face held open amusement as he came to stand beside her.

“That was quite an entrance, Blue,” the tall male said, also holding out a hand. “We were startin’ to wonder where you got off to, but you didn’t need to hurry quite that much. Good t’know you can run when you need to, though.”

Kaz glanced from hand to hand, tempted to ignore both of them and get up by himself. He thought that would hurt Lianhua’s feelings, and though he was still wary of counting any of the humans as a friend, she had shown time and time again that she was on his side, at least for now.

Reaching up, he grasped the slender fingers, and Lianhua pulled him up without any real effort. He wasn’t that much shorter than she was, and far more muscular, thanks to long hours of gathering every day, and it reminded him again that though she looked fragile, she was probably at least as strong as most kobold warriors.

Raff let his hand drop, stepping back with a shrug. Lianhua smiled, turning toward the stairs which loomed behind them, carved into an enormous replica of the head of some kind of vaguely reptilian beast, complete with kobold-high fangs and a sprawling tongue that created the only safe path over the sharp teeth.

Gaoda was glaring at them from just beyond the first bulge of tongue, looking impatient as usual.

“Where did you go?” he snapped, then waved a hand dismissively. “I don’t even care. You’re here, and you’d better stay with us from now on. You’re supposed to be our guide, not off running errands for your little kobold girlfriend.”

Kaz was surprised that the insensitive male had actually noticed the tension between Kaz and Pilla, and suspected that Lianhua, or, less likely, Chi Yincang or Raff, had suggested this as an explanation. He was happy enough not to have to use the story he’d prepared, though, and just nodded before crossing over and setting his paw on the tongue. It was so realistic that he half expected it to be spongy and moist, but it felt like any other piece of cold, unforgiving stone, so he drew in a deep breath and passed between the teeth of the beast.