EPILOGUE

In a conference room elsewhere in the city, another meeting was taking place simultaneously. Aisling sat in her chair, overwhelmed by her region's sudden, shocking developments. A century of effort had culminated in her finally silencing her competitors, forcing the few who refused to bend their knees to vacate the continent with their tails between their legs. And now, out of the blue, a godforsaken lizard had fallen into her lap, seemingly gliding under her radar for nearly 20 years, and no one could tell her how or why. The boy seemed adequately pliable when she had spoken to him, which would be bearable if he was an ordinary citizen asking for residence, but as a dragon, it meant that other people could get in his ears, too. Other people she didn't necessarily have sufficiently cowed, who might end up suggesting it was time for her retirement to this newfound power.

She had tried to fill that void with her longest-tenured advisor, Antonin. Having him teach the boy meant that she had control over his development and the information he was introduced to. Encouraging Antonin to drag his feet gave her time to handle the other fires that had sprung up and evaluate this walking catastrophe further, keeping him in relative ignorance.

“So, you asked for another week before you told me anything,” the Banshee said, her eyes still trying to make sense of the information presented on the main display in the room. “I assume you have more for me, given all this. What’s your conclusion, old man? Is he a threat?”

Antonin ran his hand through his thinning hair. He owed Aisling a great deal professionally, and some personally, but he wasn’t fond of how she had treated the boy. In his mind, the scared, shadowy, manipulative, controlling actions were a contributing factor in dragons being put down in the past. It wasn’t the boy's fault he had a nuclear reactor running at 120% inside of him, and treating him like he was out of control would only alienate him and push him away. Pushing all of his kind into positions where they felt they couldn't trust anyone made them not trust anyone, and then many would point at the cynical actions and use them to justify atrocities.

“At present, not to you or I, or the realm as a whole,” the old elf responded diplomatically.

“At present?” Aisling questioned, tapping her pen against the desk.

“He is a dragon, Ash. He’s even-tempered, and too forgiving and hesitant to take power for himself. But he, nonetheless, is a dragon. He has the capabilities for immense destruction, and we would have little recourse. On a whim during our most recent active training, he conjured a hurricane. In a span of ten seconds, properly motivated, he could flatten our city and crush all of our wardings with impunity.”

Antonin stood up and walked slowly to the display, pointing at locations on a graph as he said, “Wind speed averaged 55 meters per second, including torrential rain, hail, and lightning strikes. Now, a team of wizards could accomplish something like that themselves, if they wanted to waste all of that energy for some reason. He and the younger O’Brien did this in my grotto with no planning because it pleased them.

"I cannot stress this enough — this was nowhere near their limits. This was an endeavor of speculative, indulgent self-gratification. This was them working together to make something meaningful for themselves alone. And if you’ll look at this chart, you can see that the ambient energy level radiating from him increased after they embraced, post-completion of my challenge. He did that," Antonin emphasized, jabbing a grey finger at a still image of the raging hurricane, "and became more capable.”

“What are you saying, my friend?” Emmanuel Mengue interrupted Antonin’s explanation. “This boy recharged himself by summoning the storm?”

“Precisely. The dragon doesn’t work how we thought it did. He hasn’t built a hoard or begun collecting art and statues like the others. His Fae Book account is nearly entirely inactive; the offers we tagged were declined all in one batch, so he hasn’t been collecting ownership shares of companies through the internet, either. He simply isn’t acquiring wealth or valuables and yet continues growing in power every day.”

Antonin tapped a remote in his hand, and the display changed.

“And, it doesn’t apply to only him. The younger O’Brien was basically non-existent on our charts during the first session with her. She had no power and was incredibly unskilled with anything beyond hobbyist empathy. She was employed by one of our regional offices in the north as a convenience for her Mother, though she never would have qualified independently. Now, she is a conjurer of all sorts, capable of matching James. She still lacks the absolute capacity that he has, but the bursts she is capable of now would place her in the top ten percent of D tier.

“Of course, that relies on the wording of the rating scale. If you measure only what she is best at unassisted, she’s a D. 95th percentile D, but D. But she can draw energy from him at near-perfect efficiency — as if efficiency mattered, with his capacity — giving her powers on his scale. More importantly, even if she was isolated, she seems to have inherited his mastery for everything. She no longer wilts outside of emotional connected conjuring. She’s 95th percentile D there, but if you gave her an illusionist exam today with no warning, she’d be 90th percentile. Evocation, illusion, abjuration; All high D and developing with every lesson I give. In some domains, given her background knowledge, she is greater than him. The amount of time she spent having no aptitude of her own has made her incredibly precise with the magic she uses now.

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Aisling tapped her fingernails against the lacquered surface of the table, processing the information before her. “And, the other girl?” she eventually asked, turning to Emmanuel.

“Elizabeth was no one before she met the boy James, your grace. We found no evidence of foul play on her end. She was barely sustaining her own existence before this happened, relying on her meager charms and the graces of others. Even rogue mage families have standards of caring for their own, and this girl had no family, no friends.”

“Speaking of Elizabeth,” Antonin spoke up, “Her barrier is growing more capable. The first day, it was immense, but it was raw and uncoordinated. It was a mass of simple protections, doing its job through sheer magnitude — a good job, too, since it was wrought by a dragon. Since then, it’s grown, slightly in stature but significantly in complexity. I couldn’t get through it after several hours of attempts. Cade may be able to, but it would be a challenge for even him, assuming he was informed of the potential pitfalls beforehand and she sat still for several hours.”

“So, you’re saying that he’s impossibly powerful, if naive and disinterested and unambitious, and he’s somehow made Samantha into a prodigious conjurer in her own right and powers a self-evolving protective enchantment on Elizabeth?”

“Yes, Ash.”

“And he’s not a threat?” the Queen asked incredulously.

Antonin shook his head, “No. He is a threat only in the sense that he has access to the capabilities of eventually becoming a threat. To be blunt, Ash, just because your average mundane human has styrofoam and gasoline in their house, they aren’t terrorists burning the civilized world down with hellfire. He has the tools, but he seems reluctant to use them.”

“Your recommendation, then?”

“Let me train him, for real. Unless we antagonize him directly, he won’t react with hostilities, and he could be a massive contributor for us.”

“I’m giving you tentative permission to increase his integration. I want weekly reports. From both of you. Keep me abreast of any developments. If you feel that we’re losing control over him, we’ll need to reposition ourselves.”

“My lady, with all due respect — we have no control over him that he hasn’t given us willingly. You have no manacles that could shackle him. The only way we can proceed is to not antagonize him. We need him to want to be here, to want to contribute here, to want to build a life here. As it is, he would prefer to leave all of the madness of his introduction behind and sleep in the mountains.”

“Keep me informed. If that is what he wants, we may be able to entice him into that. Now, you’ve all heard the other realm-shaking news, I presume?”

“Yes, Ash.”

“Yes, your highness.”

“What the fuck do we do about this, gentlemen? Until this month, there were no dragons in my realm, and for very good reasons. Now, we will be playing host to six of the thrice-damned lizards, including our one permanent resident. How can we possibly maneuver our resources in time to monitor all of them?”

Antonin looked to the larger man, and Emmanuel answered quietly, “We cannot, your grace. Without hurting the efforts to stamp out the mole in our intelligence agency, we can’t reposition all of our assets to handle this level of threat.”

“Do we know how the information of our dragon got out?”

“We don’t have a definitive vector zero, but we have a dozen leads that all originate around the same time. It doesn’t seem malicious from our end; it's merely unfortunate. It was inevitable, though, Your Highness. There was no way to keep this information from spreading indefinitely,” Emmanuel answered.

“The other dragons are bound to be spying on each other, so as soon as one knew, all of them likely did,” Antonin added.

“How did this happen, gentlemen?” Aisling questioned rhetorically. “How did we finally wrest absolute control of the region, only to have a shadowy rebellion in our overseas assets at precisely the time a new dragon shows up on our doorstep? How did the information leak out precisely when we would be unable to react to the others coming here? If James had appeared two years ago, we would have had agents to spare.”

“Ash, do you think they’re connected?” Antonin asked quietly.

“No,” she answered frostily. “I’m just exhausted and frustrated from handling one potentially existential crisis and one quiet rebellion at the same time that I’m overwhelmed at the prospect of five more of the accursed monsters coming here. Is there any way we can stall their entrance paperwork?”

“For a time,” Emmanuel hedged, “But not indefinitely. They have a demonstrable, proper need to be here, according to the treaties we're party to. More importantly, we don’t want them to grow weary of our bureaucracy and host it somewhere else.”

“Eugh. No, you’re right, of course,” Aisling said, rubbing her temples. “If we let him out, he may never come back. If we allow him to leave, his cabin in the mountains might turn into a Swiss Castle, an Indonesian island beach house, or a little clearing in the Amazon. It’s just a mess.”

“Heavy lies the head, eh?” Antonin muttered with a chuckle.

“I just thought I finally had things under control, and now I’ve got the world’s biggest time bomb living in one of my residences. Our parents killed the majority of them for a reason, you know.”

“Not the ones like him, Ash. The ones like him were on our side; may they rest in peace.”

“I hope you’re right, old man. There’s too much riding on it.”