Velrilari was one of the theomes that Denziu had read about. Like all of the theomes with "Visit Me" beacons, it was well-covered in every one of Querent-Querent's sacred libraries. It was said that blessings rained down on dragons who visited the temporary artworks that the god Ghavest built up in it.
Where most of the land gods were renowned for their millennial attention spans and feats of long, subtle planning, Ghavest was known for his impulsive and impetuous creative temperament. An artist in the medium of architecture by trade, Ghavest was constantly raising and destroying buildings in Velrilari. The buildings rose by land god magic. The buildings fell by earthquake!
Velrilari was “The Blessed Earthquake Theome”, littered with old rubble as though an ancient civilization had risen and fallen within its boundaries, where a scattered tourist industry clustered around merchantgon camps and drifted along long paths in a curated false wilderness.
The caravan spent a night in Velrilari. There were three merchantgon camps in the theome, and the caravanners expected to visit all there of them for overnighting on different legs of the trip. The one near the border with Rhianasril was their first night. The one near the border with Atney would be their second night. The third would be the one along the way to Tirrtian Pass, a great landmark that awed Denziu, but they would not be travelling that way until their return trip from Wraquo when they visited Velrilari on the way back.
Even though they planned to visit every merchantgon camp, Choave wasn’t planning a single market day at Velrilari. He had a good-natured scepticism of the blessings that Ghavest gave out. "Who can prove them?" he said. "This place is the soul-searching pinnacle of a hundred stories written for leisure, where heroes find strange insights. Who will write our story, when we are just burly merchantgons travelling from Tachamund?"
Denziu quietly thought this was an error. Lorvaza's broad selection of fate-charms should have a good market opportunity here, and if the caravanners had brought a wider selection of goods, they could have spent days here profitably supplying the stream of travellers lured by Ghavest’s promise of spiritual empowerment.
That evening as zie lay trying to sleep, Denziu reflected that zie must have gained something back in Tanoriz. Zie remembered being carried across half of Denxalue. Zie had kept up just fine since Tanoriz.
Later that night…
"Hm, I know this isn't my usual medium, but... Oh! Oh, I saw that! Good! Good good good! You're attentive! I knew I could get that spell right," said an exuberant voice from nowhere in particular.
Denziu was at rest. Zie was sure of it, and intensely comfortable. Zie could feel that zir body was positioned just perfectly, and even though zie was under a blanket in a tent, there was no trace of drafty coldness or cricked limbs.
Denziu was also sitting up, alert. Somehow these two states were simultaneously true. Zie was sitting on a platform in a nebulous room, specifically. It was a rather small room, which seemed to have green (or was that blue?) tapestries of maze-like patterning hung upon every wall, and no door into the room, and... Oh, nowhere in particular was... about four feet away, once Denziu had sorted out that zie was in two places at once. That exuberant voice had come from four feet away in the room.
For there, four feet away, was a dragon of fine jade scales, cloven hooves, no wings, and a pair of helical horns sticking up from his head. He looked to be of the same species as Praoziu. "How do you feel?" said the jade-scaled dragon. "Can you talk?"
"Can I talk?" asked Denziu. Talking did feel a little odd. The Denziu that was sitting up alert could talk. The one that was perfectly at rest could not. There was a minor effort involved in sorting the two perspectives, but Denziu couldn't not make that effort. Zie felt disconcerted.
"Oh, wonderful! You know, we don't... I mean, okay, we almost never do this," said the green dragon. "I'm Ghavest! We don't usually dream-tamper! It's very forbidden, because it's very very necromancy! Oh! We're supposed to be geomancers, Denziu! But every land god is a necromancer and every lesser divinity is a geomancer."
Denziu felt a little frazzled listening to the energetic statements. The sense of perfect rest was slipping away. "Forbidden?" zie asked. "Who forbids anything to land gods?" and then, because zie had never heard of land gods dream-tampering at all, zie said, "Actually, I don't think I believe this is happening."
"Oh, we forbid each other things all the time," said 'Ghavest'. That was how Denziu thought of the apparition of a dragon, because clearly this couldn't be the real Ghavest. "Do you know, I'm doing this blind? I can't see what's about to happen. You're always just about to eject me from your dream, that's what Fate says."
"Can I do that?" asked Denziu.
"You will do that!" said 'Ghavest'. "You're stronger than I am, hee hee! At least right now, in this place."
Denziu grumbled and laid down on the platform in the nebulous room with its deep blue maze tapestries, mimicking zir position outside of the dream so the uncomfortable sense of being in two places at once would be mitigated. "Why am I having this dream?" zie asked.
"Because Choave is being an awful task master, that's why. I wanted you to look at my sculptures," said 'Ghavest', sagging on his feet with his head drooping. Momentarily. Then he perked up again and said, "But oh! Aren't you at all intrigued, oh at all, that dream magic is considered necromancy?"
"Inadagedyn thought I was interested in necromancy, too," said Denziu, yawning with the perspective that was in the room with faintly purpling blue maze-patterned tapestries. "But I don't think it is necromancy. There's no flesh modifying going on."
"This place is a-" said the over-enthusiastic green dragon, and then was cut off. For just then, Denziu had managed to just perfectly be in one place at a time, that perfectly comfortable resting position that zie was in the tent, whereupon zie woke up very gently and yet quite instantly, still feeling perfectly comfortable.
"None of that was Fated to occur!" a distant voice said, sounding just exactly like 'Ghavest', and Denziu raised zir head with a startled snort at the sound, no longer feeling quite perfectly comfortable.
Zie sighed, feeling like zie'd been cost something of zir slumber, but a moment's reflection after laying down revealed another gain: all trace of soreness was gone, leaving behind a body of perfectly comfortable muscles. It was the blessing from Tanoriz, reiterated.
And zie thought, necromancy was a strange word. Death magic, wasn't it? The magic cast from the eventual death of its practitioners. The magic that averts Fate... when dragons are Fated to live almost forever... Zie fell, wondering, into a dreamless slumber.
Talk about the caravan the next morning was that everyone had a remarkable night of sleep that night. All the muscle aches from hard wagon-pulling had gone away with supernal speed. The wagons also gleamed like they'd been made anew. There was a general agreement that they had been blessed by Ghavest.
In light of that blessing, Lorvaza broached the idea that perhaps they should celebrate a divine blessing by spending a day seeking the other blessings of Velrilari (as surely Ghavest would prefer). Choave countered that there was no caravanserai and they would never get far as merchantgons flying away from their cargos.
Instead, Choave offered a different suggestion: if they pulled hard, they might cross the theome to the next merchantgon's camp nearer to Atney, and have then a few free hours in the evening.
When they discussed it, Choave’s plan had shorter wings than an izerah. He was disappointed by the consensus against him, so Oghai offered a compromise. "We can split half-and-half if we’re afraid to leave the wagons untended. Half of us can stay with the wagons while the other half fly across the theome. At midday, we can swap."
The decision of which of them would explore in the morning and which would explore in the afternoon being nearly arbitrary, Choave allocated them, and Denziu was assigned to the afternoon exploration.
There was not the faintest sign of interest in the caravan’s wagons all morning, and Denziu wondered if they really needed to guard them at all. Ghavest had paid them personal attention by blessing them. Would the land god now permit them to be stolen from?
With no active guarding needed, the morning watch sat around a campfire roasting bread on a stick. Choave, Mosdrao, Sharisen, Orachu, Honom, and Lorma were there all morning waiting for their turn to explore the theome.
Honom didn’t partake in bread on a stick. Indeed, he might as well have been a stone carving dressed in his black cloth armour, for he was fascinatingly still and silent that morning. Even when he eventually set about some manner of sacred exercise it was still a matter of silent grace.
Sharisen the Sociable wrapped a stick in dough to cook bread on a stick with the rest of them, but she contributed exactly as many words as Honom that morning, for she was nothing for conversation, as usual. Still, she listened to everyone. Denziu remembered her admonishment to learn from her and wondered what she was thinking.
Lorma had provided the group with bread dough, but after that she departed to go searching for supplies in the merchantgon camp. “I’m buying beets if I can find any.” There was only one dragon in the camp excited about this plan, but there she was. “They grow in all manner of frosty-soiled theomes and they’re cheap near Tirrtian Pass!”
That left Choave, Mosdrao, Orachu, and Denziu to be the ones actually talking to each other that morning.
“You know, I’ve never explored Velrilari before,” admitted Choave.
“Neither’ve I,” said Orachu, eyes on the bread stick.
Mosdrao glanced between them. “ I’ve been here quite a few times in the caravan’s off-season. I think I’ve seen most of it already.”
“Is there really magic here?” asked Denziu. It seemed the most important question.
“There’s magic everywhere,” said Mosdrao with a smile. “But yeah, Ghavest is a gift-giver. He wants to be empowering. There’s something in every structure, but some of it’s challenging.”
“What kind of challenge?” Denziu asked.
“Well… Metaphysical ones. The most long-standing structures are the ones where you have to think in the right way to get the blessing out of them. There are also puzzle structures, but Ghavest gets embarrassed when too many understand them, so those don’t last long.”
“Do land gods really know when someone is ‘thinking right’ to grant rewards like that?” Denziu was struck and disconcerted by that.
“Yeah.” The smile melted away, leaving Mosdrao with a more sober attitude. He looked away from Denziu towards his bread on a stick, but he kept speaking. “That’s part of how Fate works. But, I don’t know if it’s necessarily how those structures work. Spells are cast by thinking just right, too. I think Ghavest is proudest of the structures that get those who aren’t ‘mancers at all to cast one-off spells.”
Denziu’s questions had been leading the conversation. Orachu had looked humbly interested, a pretty common thing for the quiet haulergon. Choave by contrast looked a bit embarrassed, perhaps because he’d lost the argument over what they would do that day, but he was still interested as well.
Here though, Orachu spoke up. “Spells are dangerous,” he said.
Mosdrao glanced over at Orachu and took a hand off his stick to wave it breezily in the air. “Don’t visit too many structures, then. The first one in a week won’t hurt you. Even a necromantic spell here or there won’t.”
There was a lull. Denziu considered whether to tell them about the dream zie’d had. It was still bright in memory, as though it had really happened, rather than lost and foggy like most dreams became shortly after waking. As much to keep the conversation moving as anything, zie said, “I dreamed of Ghavest last night. Can land gods meet dragons in dreams?”
Choave looked at Denziu with a very serious expression. “It isn’t wise to bet they have any limits but the self-imposed kind, though it’d be very unusual.”
“We did wake with a blessing,” said Orachu.
“What did you dream that Ghavest wanted?” asked Mosdrao.
Denziu said brightly, “For us to take a day off and visit the structures of Velrilari!”
“Hah!” snorted Choave. “I wonder if Lorvaza dreamed of Ghavest, too! Something gave her the idea to honour his blessing this way.”
“Perhaps she did,” agreed Denziu.
They kept chatting until their bread had finished cooking, then slid the coiled bread off and put some of Choave’s honey in the hole left by the stick. It was a fine morning by the company, though still a bit dull. Denziu rather wished they’d packed a board game.
When noon was nearly on them and Lorma had come back to begin cooking that evening’s meal in earnest, Mosdrao said to the others, “You know, there’s probably nothing for me to gain here, but as the rest of you are inexperienced, I can try to show you a few of Ghavest’s buildings.”
“Yes,” said Orachu. “That’s fine,” agreed Choave. “Of course!” chirped Denziu. Even Sharisen nodded mutely.
Honom broke his silence to be the only voice in dissent. “I’m really not interested in warping my mind with Ghavest’s tricks,” he said with a scowl. “You should have left me to guard the camp.”
“You should’ve offered,” rebutted Choave, returning Honom’s scowl.
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Honom inclined his head. “Perhaps next year.”
The changing of the guard saw the five dragons take flight with Mosdrao in the lead. They flew over the chill summer landscape of Velrilari, seeing a broad green land in the dark hues of coniferous forest, criss-crossed with roads and dotted all over with single structures and ruins thereof. Some of what they passed over were like statue gardens with great sculptures that dwarfed a single dragon. Other things were like cathedrals, great and complex buildings clearly designed to be beautiful. A few were less describable, being delicately twisted and improbable buildings.
Mosdrao led them first to one of those. A cluster of weirdly canting spires had aerial walkways connecting them. Given the way they leaned towards each other, some of the walkways looked structural, as though the buildings were leaning on each other for support. It was hard to imagine this building had ever survived an earthquake. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to survive any.
“Is this really safe to climb around in?” asked Choave sceptically. “It looks like it’ll fall over if you lean on the wrong wall.”
“It won’t fall over until Ghavest tires of it. Or gets embarrassed by it,” reassured Mosdrao. He led them to a door at the base of one of the spires. There were no other doors visible on the others, though they hadn’t circled the spires to check all angles.
As they were climbing the stairs inside, a disconcerting thing given the angle of the building, Mosdrao instructed them. “This will be a cramped place to explore with all of us inside at once, so we should start splitting up at the top of this first spire. The treasures in this one are at the bottom of each spire.”
The stairs let out into a small, empty room that branched with three walkways leading out of it. The group split into three, with Mosdrao accompanying Choave down one path, Denziu accompanying Orachu down another, and Sharisen taking the third walkway alone.
The next spiretop branched again, with two disturbingly angled walkways leading into two more spires. The two dragons hesitated for a moment at the branch point.
“Is there really some kind of magic insight waiting for us down there?” Denziu asked Orachu.
“Hard to imagine,” Orachu said. “How do you give insights without knowing who will visit?”
“The land gods are surely very wise,” said Denziu.
There was no reply from Orachu, and Denziu might have continued onwards, but the laconic red dragon was staring at Denziu in a way that suggested Orachu was just about to say something. At length he said, “No. They’re not all wise. Ghavest may be one of the foolish ones.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I’ve heard Fate is very weak in Velrilari,” said Orachu. “I think what we find will have very little meaning.” With that, Orachu picked one of the two walkways and departed down it.
Denziu walked down the other one, and discovered that a pathway reconvergence resulted in walking into a room with Sharisen the Sociable and a downwards staircase. The white dragon was sitting on the slanted floor of the towertop, looking out one of the windows at a view of the Velrilari countryside.
“Hello Sharisen,” said Denziu.
She looked over at Denziu and inclined her head briefly, then went back to staring out the window.
“Have you been down this spire already?” zie asked.
“No.”
Denziu stared out the window for a moment with Sharisen. There was nothing special about the window save that it was the only time Denziu had ever looked out a window while sitting on a slanted floor. There was what looked like a ruined cathedral with a broken fountain before it visible on a distant hilltop.
Trying to interact with Sharisen was always flummoxing. Even Honom was more vocal. Denziu couldn’t think of anything else to say, so zie went down the staircase in the spire instead. The stairs spiralled down with windows alongside, until one of the windows was half-full of dirt and after that were windows with little lights inside of them to highlight the dirt outside as seen from inside.
The staircase opened into a small basement brightly lit with magic lights. A table filled the room, covered in irregular fragments of blotchy purple. There was no order to them, but among the many pieces with no apparent use some looked to be hinge pieces, and others looked like latches. If Mosdrao hadn’t mentioned puzzles, this would just look like a mess to me, thought Denziu, picking up some of the fragments. They felt ordinary. Some of them kind of fit together, maybe. At the stair-side of the table, some of them were already fit together, as though prior visitors had fiddled with them.
Starting with a latch and a hinge, zie put other fragments together. When zie linked two corners together successfully, the shape they described was so very much like two corners of a cuboid that zie decided that zie was making a little box.
Around then, Sharisen came down the stairs as well, and Denziu gestured with the partial box, then pulled a latch and a hinge out of the pile to set them aside for Sharisen. Without a word, the two of them started working on the box-bits. They showed each other shapes that fit and traded pieces every so often.
Eventually, between the two of them they made two complete boxes out of the pile of blotchy purple fragments on the table. A few more of the pieces at the stair-side of the table were already fit together.
There was no sign of any magic to this discovery until, playing with the latches on the boxes, Sharisen latched the box closed entirely, then opened it again. With a little cry of surprise, she pulled a copper ring out of the box and showed it to Denziu. Denziu did the same thing and fetched out another copper ring from the second box.
Repeating the gesture only revealed an empty box.
The rings were claw-rings that adjusted themselves to fit perfectly like magic items did, but there was no further sign of magic to them beyond self-fitting. They came right off again and yielded nothing to Denziu’s eye. They looked like simple worked copper rings.
The two of them went up the stairs bearing little blotchy purple boxes and wearing new copper rings. Denziu thought to wonder what the purpose of the puzzle was and might have said so with anyone else, but Sharisen’s quiet presence nearby made zir wonder if silence might be wiser.
When the five dragons regrouped before the cluster of spires, all of them save Mosdrao were wearing self-fit copper rings on their claws. Denziu and Sharisen were the last to arrive and were the only ones carrying blotchy purple boxes.
Looking around at the group, Choave asked, “Did we all reach into a weird fizzing ball for these?”
“I put together a box for mine,” said Denziu, gesturing with the box zie was still carrying.
“I got mine by arranging five spotlights to converge on a pedestal,” said Orachu.
Since they’d all been led here by Mosdrao, the four dragons with new rings converged to look at Mosdrao. After a moment, Choave asked, “What do these do?”
Mosdrao just hummed briefly and then asked, “Want to try another place?”
With considerably diminished enthusiasm and a general attitude of “we might as well”, the next place the five visited was one of the cathedrals.
The inside turned out to be an art gallery with a vaulted ceiling. It was full of pedestals behind glass over which floated images that progressed regularly through a kind of short story, and each glass display made a soft ticking noise audible when one stood right next to it. “This is one of the better ones. It’s worth a spell if you can figure it out,” said Mosdrao by way of introduction.
The stories were all rather horrible. They were full of dragons slipping from high places, which was really still a dangerous thing even for a winged creature, or missing something and being struck by a trap that was obvious from the viewer’s POV. Again and again the depicted dragons went about greedily or recklessly approaching a dangerous situation and then suffering for it, while the displays ticked quietly through sequences of images.
“Can we alter these?” asked Denziu.
“An excellent question.” Mosdrao stayed where he was: by the entrance, watching all of them. “Can you?”
There were no controls on the displayed pedestals under the images, nor anything behind the glass displays when Denziu checked. Tapping at the display did nothing to it, and they had no scent to speak of.
After the four dragons had been staring uselessly at the short awful stories for a while, Mosdrao drooped a bit and said, “This one may be unfair. It’s a different experience for those who already know how to cast a spell.”
Choave frowned at one of the displays that he’d been studying particularly intently. A golden vrash in very flattering white armour was depicted failing to hold off a collapsing ceiling while a hidden lever was very obvious to the viewer. “A spell? I know a spell,” he muttered.
The brown vrash sat before the display, rearing up to free both hands to press against the glass of the display. Black fumes dripped from his hands through the glass that kept him back from the pedestal under the image. They sought the pedestal, and nothing happened.
One by one, the other four noticed Choave casting and turned to watch him.
The black fumes curled about and through the image. At first, there was no effect, but then with a shocked intake of breath from Choave his spell caught on the golden vrash depicted in the image. On this cycle, the golden vrash mightily shoved back the collapsing ceiling, and lasted several frames longer struggling against it.
Despite the surprise change, the story ended the same way as all the others. The vrash fell and was crushed instantly by the massive ceiling.
Choave ended the spell channelling, but the dragon in the next iteration of the story still got boosted mightily by a new frame depicting black fumes seeping into the image.
“It was like casting it on a dragon that’s actually there,” Choave declared to the room. “It changed the story!”
“Can we do that?” asked Denziu. “We don’t know any spells.”
“Everyone starts somewhere,” said Mosdrao.
Every dragon in every one of the stories on display in the room made a mistake that was obvious to the viewer and hidden to them.
The group spent much longer in this place than they had in the place of warped spires. They made funny gestures at the displays like they were Honom practising forms back at camp, and occasionally they shouted exasperated advice at the depicted dragons.
Denziu thought of the spellcaster zie knew best: zir sibling Aleicree, who had started self-teaching magic early by prolonged meditations on zir amicus breeze. Was redirecting the amicus breeze a spell? So Denziu started invisibly buffeting one of the dragons in the image with fluctuations of the amicus breezes.
This did nothing and seemed to have no effect on any of the stories… up until zie saved one of the dragons who was about to fall off a ledge with a gust of wind.
The story changed. Now, a new frame of a wind gust appeared, and the display in the pedestal ticked through a story where a greedy dragon trying to get to a treasure chest on the other side of a pit nearly fell into the pit when a piece of the ledge lining the pit crumbled underfoot, but was kept safe by spreading their wings to cup a strong wind blowing from the pit itself.
“I got one of them!” shouted Denziu. “Look!”
There was one further alteration to the story. Three new frames on the end indicated something turning in the design on the floor of the room, which they’d all ignored up until then. It was a colourful abstract mosaic.
Denziu touched the part that had been depicted turning, and discovered that (while it took a very firm pressure), the floor tiles could be pushed through a grinding alteration. Poking around at the floor, zie found other bits that could likewise be turned.
After this, Denziu and Sharisen went around focusedly buffeting the characters in the story with their most basic wind spell to see how many of the image-dragons could be saved by gusty winds alone. Several of them were pushed away from hazards or made to notice what they’d missed, and their stories were changed to stories where they survived. Each of these revealed another three-frame modification to the floor mosaic.
Choave started hunting through the images to see if his one spell could save any of them, and although he seemed very reluctant to try it by just casting it, he did find one. By vigour alone he managed to save a dragon clambering up a difficult ledge in a cave. Another floor mosaic hint was the result.
They had Orachu do the pushing and shoving at the floor to put it into the correct position.
They couldn’t save all of the dragons depicted with the spells they had available, and after half an hour of thinking very hard at the display boxes with their images in them, there was no breakthrough in casting new magic. Yet there was something that Mosdrao pointed out: “I won’t tell you where the turn points are, but the floor is a map.”
“Did you figure this one out?” Denziu asked.
“Kind of?” Mosdrao shrugged. “I just focused on their point of view until I knew what the thing they needed to see would look like to them… you know, if they were real dragons in a real place and not just flat, simple images… and then the stories changed as though they’d never bumbled at all. It didn’t feel like casting a spell.”
Fifteen minutes later they’d saved the rest of the image-dragons with that hint. When all of its pieces were correctly rotated, the room’s abstract floor mosaic turned out to be a map of Velrilari with an elaborate highlight around one particular spot.
“Well done!” beamed Mosdrao. “Let’s go there next!”
The spot from the map turned out to be one of the many crumbled ruins in Velrilari, with nothing to distinguish it from any of the other most useless to visit places in the theome. “This one’s a trick,” Mosdrao said as they walked into the shadow of the fallen building and found an intact downward staircase.
“You said this place is worth a spell.” Choave took up a place next to Mosdrao at the front of the group. “Will we really learn a spell here?”
“No, the last place was worth a spell, but none of you got it,” said Mosdrao. “Neither did I, but some do.”
“You mean there was another puzzle solution?” groaned Denziu.
“Yup! Lots of them in that room. Now, this place… is pretty simple.”
They came upon a dark basement area, half full of fallen stone. Yet just around the corner from the stairs, a gleaming treasure chest stood in an intact niche in the walls, with a glowing magic light dangling from the ceiling above it.
“Don’t take the chest itself,” cautioned Mosdrao, looking at a greedy expression that had lit up on Choave.
Choave nevertheless stepped forward to open the chest. Crouching before it, he read aloud a legend from the front that said, “For those who know the land god’s burden.” Opening it up, he pulled from a velvet interior a handful of five brittle ceramic amulets. He held them up to the group for a moment, then started passing them around one to each person.
“Oh, there’s five,” said Mosdrao as he took the first one. “I guess I get another one.”
“These look like curse plates,” Denziu said, thinking about how brittle ceramic was usually used for curses rather than spells that anyone would want to have on them. Zie looked at both sides of the amulet. On the back there was tiny text that said, “For one loved by Denziu. Sell me not.”
“Oh no, they’re not curse plates,” Mosdrao said. “These are extra lives! Sort of, at least. You can dedicate them to someone by putting it on a statue or bust of them, and that person will survive the next thing that would have killed them. When that happens, the amulet will break. They’re called morbid luck charms.”
“Oh, praise Ghavest!” exclaimed Choave. “These are worth a fortune at market!”
“Turn it over,” said Denziu.
Choave turned his new amulet over in his hands and read aloud, “For one loved by Choave. Sell me not.” He looked up. “Huh. I guess Ghavest customised these.”
“Knew which one we’d get,” said Orachu, who was also looking at the other side of his amulet.
Sharisen looked dejected, holding the amulet up by its clasped strand. “I don’t have a pantheon room at home. I can’t dedicate this to anyone.”
There was a moment of silence in the room. The mood was… tentative. It was as though Ghavest had challenged Sharisen grievously, and nobody wanted to step between them.
Eventually, Orachu stepped to Sharisen and, sitting next to her, reared up to put a hand on her shoulder. “Sharisen, we live longer because we love each other.”
“Everyone dies,” Sharisen said acidly.
Choave took a step forward. “Commission a statue of any dragon you even faintly like, and put that amulet on the statue. That’ll slow somebody’s death.”
“You,” accused Sharisen, staring at Choave.
Choave was taken aback. “Oh! Uh, thank you?”
“I think we should just go back to camp now,” Denziu said.
They went back to camp and stowed the morbid charms, and the whole camp was full of dragons talking about the art and puzzles they saw in Velrilari. The morbid charms that Mosdrao had led them to were the most valuable find, but the others had scattered to different corners of Velrilari so that every one of them had their own tale of what they’d found.
After that, they stayed on the main road out of Velrilari towards Lorilaine, and they didn’t stop after all at the camp on the other side. Choave hurried them on saying, “If Lorilaine takes more than a day to cross, we can camp there. It’s a very safe place to camp.”
Despite the ruined structures they’d seen and Velrilari's reputation as 'the earthquake theome', there was not any perceptible tremoring underfoot that day, and Denziu reflected that it was probably not an everyday event for Ghavest to destroy an art piece via breaking the earth underneath it.
Not for the first time, Denziu marvelled at the distances they were crossing. Zie could've crossed it all dramatically faster by wing, yet zie had never flown so far from home.