“Are you alone?” Rotgoriel asked, squinting at his brother.

Rich smiled. The bruises on his face were gone, the only darkness remaining a flickering from the starry void around the edges of the mirror's frame. “Of course not,” he replied. “They're watching everything now. Oh, they moved us to what's essentially house arrest, even though they're calling it protection, but it's the same thing. But at least I get to see Mom and Fred again.”

Rotgoriel ignored the twinge of pain that her mention brought. He missed Richard's mother. He missed her hugs.

The heartache reminded him of something else. “I spoke with Agnezsharron.”

Rich bit his lip.

“It is fortunate for all of us,” Rotgoriel kept his tone calm, so calm, “that we are dragons, and not humans. I forgive you. She came to you, and you were weak. I can forgive that.”

“Yeah,” Rich said, closing his eyes. “Tell her I'm sorry it worked out this way.”

“She has left to gather her thoughts.”

“Wait, what?”

“She has left to—”

“Hold on. We're down a dragon? Shit, this is bad. We needed her, she's our best shaman, too.”

“Well when she returns I will tell her that,” Rotgoriel snarled. “If she can make it past the lines alive.”

“The lines?”

“I was... getting to that.” Rotgoriel let out a sigh. “The Bharstool Warmers have mobilized. They have pulled every soldier, every monster they control, every abomination, and are marching towards Kai-Tan with everything they have.”

“What... already?” Rich whispered. “It's only been two weeks! We were supposed to have time. We were supposed to have at least a month or two. Their losses at Turpentine were too big.”

“The flaw in the plan, the mistake that we made, was that we expected our foes to care about their holdings. They do not. They leave their conquered lands unguarded. Other forces are moving in, not just players. They are either looting or seizing what they can.”

“They're burning up their powerbase to get us,” Rich whispered. “They want us that badly.”

“They want me,” Rotgoriel said. “They want a mask on my face, Richard.”

The words hung there, between the worlds. And Rotgoriel could not tell if the chill on his back was the wind between the real spaces, or the unease that never left him, now.

“Well we've known that for a long time now, haven't we?” Richard said. “The Icon. That time in that stinking little village, four years ago. What else is new?”

“It is their only goal in this,” Rotgoriel said. “That is what Midian claims, anyway.”

“Midian! So she was in Kai-Tan?”

“She was. Now she is in Eidolon.”

Rich winced. “Still say that's a stupid name for it. But wait, no, what's this about Midian? Did she finally come clean, or is it an any port in the storm situation as far as we're concerned?”

“What are you... ah. No. She came clean, as you say it. Midian admitted her issue with full disclosure. There are no secrets between us, now. She is a creature like Legion.”

A long pause followed. “What?” Rich whispered.

“She is an artificial intelligence.”

“No. That's impossible. She's crazy or lying.”

“That is a possibility. But I do not think she is lying. She has nothing to gain from that, and she knows details about Legion that we have confirmed. He has infiltrated our guild, for instance. Cutter has investigated that, and likes the notion even less than I do.”

“Cutter? He's back in the game?”

“He has been since the day you were assaulted. He has been spending much time, here.”

“I need to learn his trick. The one that lets him log in without logging in, can you ask him about it?”

“I can. There is time enough for that,” Rotgoriel mused. “We have a few days before their first waves get here.”

“Shit,” Rich sighed. “I might have to come through regardless. Even if they're watching me, we need to get moving. There's things I need to talk with Midian about. I'm still having trouble believing that she's an AI. I've known her for, hell, since I was eleven. Before I knew you. Before I was anything but just a kid with an abusive dad and no real hope for a future.”

“The bad times,” agreed Rotgoriel. “I am glad to know you, brother. Your future is mine, and mine is yours. Together we will—”

Seventeen voices rose as one.

Seventeen hatchlings cried out for their parents, screaming for help into the void.

Seventeen hatchlings died.

With a horrible wrenching feeling, the connection broke, and Rotgoriel gasped as he found himself back in his lair.

He hurt. And the screams were still in his ears, still echoing through his head, filling it as they faded away.

“What?” he whispered.

Troubled, he paced around his lair. It was a small vault, under the council chambers. They had carved it from the rock, deep under the forest, and the air was a bit tight in here, but it did a good job of safeguarding his (recently depleted) hoard. But the coins themselves seemed to be filled with unease, almost seemed to echo the screams that had ripped through the worlds.

He considered the mirror, then put it back in its box. It didn't look any different.

Noise from the open door, and he poked his head through the vast doorway in time to see Midian hurrying down the stairs at full speed, holding her skirts up with both hands. “Something's wrong!” she yelled, not slowing a bit.

“I felt it. What has happened?”

“I don't know. I need you to fly me somewhere right now!”

“Why...”

“It has to be you! I have to be flying on dragonback, or else things get bad!”

“You want to...” Rotgoriel paused. “In front of everybody?”

“No time!” she grabbed his claw and tried to tug him up the stairs.

She might as well have been trying to shift a mountain, but he went along, still protesting. “Look, that one time was an emergency, if I start doing this for you then I will have to do it for everybody—”

“No time!”

He followed her up the stairs, and out to the courtyard, out to the waystone they had built there, a circle of statues of perhaps a dozen races holding hands and facing inward. There were flashes and ripples in the air as players teleported in, all looking confused.

Rotgoriel blinked in the light, and flared his wings... then realized that Midian was scrambling up his side. “Hey!”

“Fly!” she screamed.

He flew.

Up in spirals, launching from the hill, then turning to catch updrafts, circling until he had reached enough altitude to clear the trees.

“Where?” he roared.

“West!”

Then it was toward the sun, squinting at the glare. West, past the sprawl that was Kai-Tan, the gilded towers glinting in the afternoon sun.

“Here?”

“No! Go until you see it!”

And he flew, wings pounding the air, putting on speed as he went. Slow at first, slow as stone dragons were, but momentum was not to be underestimated, and soon he was moving at a pretty good clip.

And when the vast farmlands that fed Kai-Tan had faded behind them, they came to a part of the world known as the Brokecrown borderlands. He had heard of it, but never ventured so far before. Large tangles of wilderness, interspersed with settlements, and the remains of settlements. Places that looked like smaller versions of Eidolon, where fields of stumps showed work once done to tame the land, and flat, regular patches of vegetation marked the remains of fields.

But where Eidolon was new, stable, and organized, the lands out here were chaotic, a patchwork of the untouched mingling with the ruins of the fallen, and only a few places doing anything that could be called thriving. The Brokecrown borderlands where were dynasties came to die. They were where exiles fled to when the world turned against them, and their faces were unwelcome in civilized lands. They were where any brigand could call himself king, and set up his or her own land to rule, if they had the strength and numbers to hold it.

The Brokecrown borderlands were a reflection of Kai-Tan's anarchy, but where the city had been settled and conquered long ago, the borderlands stretched over a wilderness that had no love for men, or any other 'civilized' races, for that matter. It ate the weak and unwary, and so no ruler had ever managed to unify the whole of it. Perhaps none ever would.

Rotgoriel scanned the ground below, uncertain what Midian might be seeking. He saw nothing that might cause alarm, nothing that might be the cause of his unease.

Nothing until the land started to rise again, and hills broke the forests.

Nothing until the darkness appeared on the horizon.

And as he stared at it, Rotgoriel realized that wasn't quite right.

The darkness wasn't appearing on the horizon.

The darkness was the horizon.

It grew as he approached, a vast wall of the stuff, as if the world simply ended ahead of him.

He braked as best he could, changing his angle, slowing his approach. “Midian?” he called back, once the wind was a bit quieter against his ears.

“Don't touch it. Get close and land, but don't touch it,” she said.

“How close is close?” Rotgoriel asked.

“A little under ten seconds away.”

That was a bizarre way to phrase it, but Rotgoriel complied, landing a few hundred yards on the peak of a high mountain, and creeping forward until he was but five yards from the darkness. A bit closer perhaps, than she wanted, but Midian didn't complain.

Instead she whispered “Foresight.”

“Should I to be doing anything?” Rotgoriel asked.

“No. No, definitely not,” she said, in a hurry. “It would not end well. Okay. Okay, how did this happen? Who did this? We have a little time. Accelerate. Short Vision.”

He felt her legs stiffen on his back, and turned his head to find her slumped against his spine. Her face was a blur of motion, and her hands flickered as well, and it took about a minute's study before he realized that she was moving, her face changing expressions and her fingers twitching, both so fast that he could only barely register their motion.

The minutes slid by, and Rotgoriel waited, fidgeting. Then he heard her sigh. “I probably should have pulled you into the vision, sorry. I'll share the next one. Though this one was fairly inconclusive. I don't think the Thing in Yellow is behind this. Somebody did something they shouldn't have, that's for certain, but it wasn't our current foes.”

“What exactly did they do?” Rotgoriel said, scooping up a bit of earth and throwing it toward the black wall. It vanished into the impenetrable darkness, and he heard no sign that the debris had struck the ground.

“I don't know. But it's got something to do with dragons. A lot to do with dragons. In fact—”

Rotgoriel heard nothing more, because the world swam in his eyes. And he heard voices, familiar angry voices. These were the ones who had spoken to him in the egg, twice. And there as the world ran and melted like wax around him, he heard them roaring.

“FIND THE DEFILERS. KILL THE DEFILERS. THEY HUNT OUR YOUNG! DESTROY THEM!”

Images flashed past, images of glowing crystals being pulled from caves, from lairs, flicker-fast images of people of different races, all wielding magical equipment, all seeming to be adventurers of one sort or another.

All who had removed dragon's eggs from their resting places.

And it didn't miss his notice that quite a few of those adventurers were wearing beaten copper masks.

“—goriel? Rotgoriel?”

He came back to himself, shook his head as the world snapped back into focus. “The ancestors just spoke to me. The ancestors spoke to me, but I was not dreaming. They are not supposed to be able to do that,” he whispered.

“What did they say?”

“It was a call to arms,” Rotgoriel said, feeling the earth shiver beneath his feet, in a way that could be mistaken for an earthquake, but he knew, he knew was an ancient shifting deep in the stone. “It was a call for ruin, and I do not know if we can escape the vengeance they shall wreak upon this world.”