The next day, Snen and Intong carried Kaz outside of the city, with Li flying close behind. Kaz then tried to remove the runes from the dantians of the twelve dragons, with mixed success. The ‘silence’ rune slipped away easily enough for all but the oldest dragon. ‘Insensate’ was next, and the one Kaz was most concerned about, because he had no idea how the dragons would respond to their new circumstances. That rune could only be removed from four of the dragons, however, and as it tugged free from the last dragon’s dantian, it left a dangling thread of black. Kaz thought it might finish dissolving on its own eventually, but he wasn’t willing to pull on it and damage the dragon.

After that, he stopped, watching Li and and Snen speak to the dragons. They were like puppies, with all the memories of their lives, but little to no comprehension. Rather than suddenly understanding what had happened to them, they were confused, looking to Snen, Intong, and Li to explain. The core concepts were completely new to them, so only one seemed to understand enough to be angry. He was a large, green-scaled male named Yanshi, and he demanded that Kaz immediately remove his other runes.

“I don’t know if I can,” he told the huge creature, staring up into eyes almost as large as his head. Kaz had changed back into his kobold shape as soon as they left Cliffcross, and the dragon seemed even larger than he had the day before.

Yanshi growled, baring his teeth, and then Li was there between them, roaring so fiercely that a dragon many times her size took a step back.

Li said,

The ‘don’t eat people’ statement was one that had already been repeated several times. It seemed wise to make sure that was clear while the dragons were still learning. Li had already had a few conversations that might have been amusing if the being with whom she spoke hadn’t been capable of eating the population of a small tribe.

“I may learn how to do better in time,” Kaz told the green dragon. “But for now, I’m worried that I’ll harm you if I pull too hard.”

Yanshi settled back, yellow eyes going from Kaz to Li. All the others who had had the first two runes removed were watching now, and though they knew little, they weren’t stupid. he said, then scratched three marks into the dirt with a sharp talon.

It wasn’t a question, but Kaz nodded. “One to keep you from growing stronger, one to cut your lives short, and one to make all of the runes stay in place from generation to generation. I wasn’t able to clear that one, even from Intong.”

Yanshi said, but it wasn’t a threat this time. He leaned his head down, waiting.

Kaz stretched out his hand, cautiously touching the next rune with his ki. ‘Stall’ was stiff, unwilling to move until Kaz shoved hard at his reverse image of it. Then it tugged free, but he could see that the dantian was thin and raw where it had clung. Yanshi winced in pain as he coughed up a glob of stinking blackness.

When it was done, the dragon spoke again, but his voice was weaker. he said.

“Yes,” Kaz agreed, clenching his teeth. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to try any more right now. It- You may heal, and you may not. I don’t know.” And that was frustrating beyond measure. A healer should know the body of those he healed. He should know the risks and the rewards, be able to balance them for the best result. But he didn’t. Would Yanshi’s dantian heal? How long would it take?

Yanshi was silent as the wind blew around them. It was stronger today than Kaz had felt it before. There was a chill behind it, too, a feeling of moisture. Was rain coming? He didn’t know that either, and again he felt inadequate. The simplest things about this world were a mystery to him, and he thought he could spend a hundred lifetimes without learning everything.

Yanshi said finally.

Kaz shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m fairly certain it’s too late for ‘viscid’. Snen says you’re older than Intong, and age is definitely a determining factor. I can try ‘ephemeral’, but not now that your dantian is damaged. You have to heal first.” That he was certain of, deep in his bones.

The green dragon sighed, turning to look at Li.

Li started to nod, then stopped. she said in a small voice.

Yanshi nodded, then climbed to his feet. He turned and walked away, though he kept an eye on the proceedings as Kaz moved to the next dragon.

‘Ephemeral’ was actually easier to remove than ‘stall’, and Kaz wished he’d tried that one first on Yanshi. Now he knew, though, so he erased ‘ephemeral’ from all three of the newly sapient dragons, then tried ‘stall’ again. Only one, which Snen said was about the same age as Intong, could be freed.

Besides Intong, that left seven dragons who could speak, but were no more intelligent than they had been before. Four dragons, including Yanshi, had their minds freed, three would live longer lives, and only Yanshi and a yellowish-brown dragon named Renao could grow their ki.

Renao was a young female who was already playing happily with Li, chasing fallen leaves, and asking question after question about the sky, the trees, and what exactly she could eat, if not people. She distracted Li and the other dragons, including the ones Kaz couldn’t help but think of as numb-minds, while Snen and Kaz stepped away from the group.

“That went better than I’d feared,” Kaz said softly, watching as Li snatched a butterfly from the air before spitting it out again, only to have Renao snap it up and swallow it whole. Li began to berate the larger female, which led to a playful chase, though none of the dragons seemed willing to get far away yet.

Snen hissed in agreement. “These are some of the best dragons we have,” he said. “The wilder ones are usually placed in the breeding pens, and have little to no experience with xiyi except as providers of food. It does seem that the largest dragons, which are also the oldest, may only be able to regain their voices. That might be for the best, though,” he admitted reluctantly.

Kaz nodded. A large group of wild, powerful, intelligent dragons bent on vengeance or destruction would not be good. In fact, they might well send the humans down a dark tunnel. Right now, it seemed that humans simply killed dragons who damaged their homes, but if those dragons suddenly became a much greater threat, he had no doubt the humans would make a concerted effort to eradicate them all, if possible. The last thing he wanted to do was free the dragons only to see them killed, and he didn’t want to be responsible for any more unnecessary human deaths, either.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“I freed Li when she had only just hatched,” he said. “The hatchlings will need adult dragons to care for them, but if your people are willing, it seems that at least some of those we free will accept your help.”

Together, they turned toward Intong, who was lying with his head on his front feet, basking in the warm sunshine. Feeling their eyes on him, he opened his, yawning. he asked, his voice already sounding clearer and more lucid than it had the day before.

Snen shook his head, the longer, pointed scales on top of his head lifting slightly as he gave his hissing laugh. “I only hope that you will allow me to remain by your side, xiongdi.”

Intong rolled onto his side, exposing his belly to the light. he said simply before closing his eyes again.

Kaz’s tail wagged. If there were others like Snen and Intong, the newly hatched dragons should be safe and well cared-for until they were ready to make their own way in the world. Which reminded him of some questions he kept meaning to ask. “How many of your people - I mean xiyi who believe that the dragons should be free - are there? Are they the same as the ones who do not wish to continue using the duqiu and fangqiu?”

Snen sighed. “Much the same, but not entirely,” he admitted. “People who have been careful not to be too obvious about their convictions will have to make a choice, and I don’t know where the divide will fall. As soon as we’re done today, I’ll go home and see how things are going. Without dragons, it will take the others a few days to reach home. Only Kus Ukark and I know that there is a way to remove the qiu, so we can begin quietly gathering allies, but it may take some time, since we can’t yet remove them ourselves.”

Kaz hesitated. “That may not be quite true. That you’re the only ones who know.”

The xiyi stiffened. “You told others?”

“On the way out, there were two xiyi who surrendered; bowed down before Li and said the same thing Kus Ukark did when he saw her. I removed their qiu and let them go.” It was his turn to sigh, and he looked at the two dragons chasing a squawking bird across the sky. “There had been enough killing.”

Snen’s eyes were wide and almost hopeful. “If they requested forgiveness, then they were my allies. There were few of us among the xiyi here. Ganring brought his supporters, of course. Kus Ukark was the only elder not related to Ganring, and his attendants would have been among those you faced. I had feared them dead. But perhaps they live, and more, have been freed!”

He started to kneel, but Kaz caught his arms and pulled him back up. He wasn’t sure if it was the xiyi in general or Snen in particular, but his new friend was far too ready to yield. How could they defeat the tribe of someone like Ganring with such an attitude?

“I’m no chief,” Kaz said, “and if I were, I wouldn’t want you to kneel before me.”

“You are a Kus, and have freed both me and my allies. You stand ready to return to the dragons what we unintentionally stole from them.” Snen’s yellow eyes were steady as they met Kaz’s. “You have saved not one race but two, and you saved my life and Intong’s as well. I owe you every respect. But fear not.” He bared dagger-like teeth, “My enemies will not see me as weak.”

That was a relief. Kaz didn’t like to think of Snen going home, only to be cut down by his adversaries. Still, he shook his head. “I did what anyone would, if they could. And I failed…too many.”

He thought of the humans who had fallen while escaping the xiyi. And while he didn’t feel as directly responsible for the ones who died on the mage island, he still wondered if he could have been less impulsive, moved more quickly, simply made better choices that would have resulted in fewer deaths. And of course there was the revolt in the mosui city. He was certain lives had been lost there that shouldn’t have been. His every action seemed to change the very world around him, and he longed to be done with it all.

Snen shook his head. “Lives are always the price of freedom,” he said sadly. “My people have known that from the moment we understood what we were. We were made to serve, and when our service was done, we would have been discarded like the used-up tools we were. We chose to do what we had to in order to escape that fate, and we are well aware we made mistakes.”

Turning, he glanced toward the dragons, many of whom were now stretched out beside Intong. “We guarded the dragon’s eggs,” he whispered, barely audible even to Kaz. “That was our task, our duty. But when we discovered that that duty wasn’t all there was to the world, we wanted to leave.

“They were too powerful. So we cursed them, the young who had never yet harmed us. We were afraid, and we believed that if they remained alive and strong, they would chase us down and force us back into servitude. But we didn’t know that that curse would linger, generation upon generation, and so we took our masters’ guilt upon ourselves, doing to them what they had once done to us.”

“How could you not know?” Kaz asked, just as quietly. “Didn’t your shamans create the curse?”

“We had no shamans then. Not as we do now. We were allowed no true leaders.” Snen sighed. “I don’t know where the curse came from, I only know that we chose to use it. Many of us died on the day we killed the False Emperor, and none left alive knew who betrayed Qiangde. Truthfully, that time is almost as lost to us as it is to the dragons. We had to leave everything behind, including any history not locked within the minds of those who survived.”

“And yet you remained with Jianying, and continued watching over the dragon’s eggs,” Kaz said.

“He was injured when he fought Qiangde,” Snen said. “We were so used to obedience that when he told us where to take him, we did. We owed it to him for his help, in any case. But then we found that all of our eggs laid outside the mountain were infertile. Only those xiyi who decided to stay with Jianying in his new home had young. What could we do? A race without children is a dead race. And when we saw that we had doomed the dragons as well, we had no choice but to return to our task.” He glanced at Intong. “Though there are good reasons not to regret that.”

It was true, and Kaz had no idea what his own people would do if faced with such a dilemma. Serve a cruel and whimsical master, or die out in a single generation? He found his eyes drawn to the highest peak in the distant mountain range. He knew it was his home, as certainly as he knew that soft grass poked up between his toes, tangling gently in his fur. But his mountain was the xiyi’s home, too. They had as much right to live there as the kobolds or the mosui. If they wanted to, they should be able to return.

Then his gaze turned to a low, almost flat-topped mountain not far away from his. The top was purple and green rather than white with snow, and it was short and squat instead of soaring into a high and delicate point. But there was something about it, something…familiar.

Lifting his hand, he pointed. “Is that your home?” he asked, and his voice sounded odd, even to him. It was deeper, more resonant; his own, but more.

Snen turned to stare at him. “Yes-ss,” he hissed, almost as if he couldn’t help himself.

There was ki in the grass beneath Kaz’s paws. Mana in the air. More ki and mana in every small creature that crawled, every plant that grew, every gust of wind that pushed the clouds he could now sense approaching from the direction where the sun had risen. He could feel it all, whispering to him, telling him that he was part of it, and it of him.

“The world doesn’t understand you,” he told Snen, his voice still holding more than a voice should be able to contain. “But it will soon. And when it does, your people will be free to live wherever you wish.”

This time when Snen knelt, Kaz didn’t try to stop him. He was too busy trying to teach the world a new howl.