“The spell is ready,” I told Cassia and Visk as the lines of aether began to swirl around me. The pattern Sixth and I had put together wasn’t exactly the same as the Prismatic Mirror, but it called on many of the same design elements. Sixth was responsible for holding the pattern in my head while I provided the power to charge the spell.

  Both of my Companions hurried to get ready for our departure. Magnus was collected from where he’d been laying on top of Cassia’s cloak. Once all three were gathered close, I let the spell construct begin to play out.

  When I had seen the Prismatic Mirror used in the past, it had transported people inside of a small radius with a flash of blinding light and a sound like shattering glass. What had been left behind was a tear in the air itself, a prismatic colored wound on the fabric of the world.

  The sensation I experienced as the spell coiled out around me was closer to being stretched. Everything around me felt like it was simultaneously as far away as the horizon and as close as the ground beneath my claws. Moments in time suffered the same fate as my perception of the world around me became strained.

  The spell took an immense amount of magic. It didn’t feel like there was a flaw in the structure. Instead, it was a direct result of moving something with my sheer physical size over a great distance. Sixth had mentioned that if I wasn’t literally full to the bursting with magic at the moment, this kind of spell may have been beyond my reach.

  As for my companions, they were brought along with me. I had an inexplicable feeling of ‘closeness’ to both Cassia and Visk as a part of the process. Beyond Cassia’s and my emotional-magical connection, it felt like the huntress, the elf, and I were sharing the same physical space for a brief moment. Magnus was present, but as something akin to a secondary proximity. Perhaps it was due to how he was unconscious and clinging on to life.

  There was a ‘Snap’ as the sensation of being stretched suddenly ended. When I looked around, we appeared to be floating in an empty Void akin to the one that existed formerly in the Tower of Baedain’s pocket realm. What surrounded us was not ‘black’ in color. Black would imply darkness, which was the absence of light. Instead, this place was absent of everything.

  Even darkness did not exist in the Void. The only things which did exist were me and the people I’d brought with me. If I was forced to describe what I saw, it would involve the least amount of inaccuracy possible to say that it was ‘grey with a lot of flickering prisma-color’.

  A sudden sensation of danger crawled over my body as I hung in the void. Whatever this place was, it didn’t allow me to move around. There was no space for me to move through, so I was effectively stuck within the boundaries of my own body. Only Cassia, Visk, and Magnus partially touching me kept me from losing track of them entirely.

  While I might not have been able to move through the void, something else could. While I couldn’t see it due to the sensory baffling nature of this not-place, my predatory instincts were screaming at me. The only thing that those instincts could tell me was that something immeasurably vast and dangerous had taken notice of me. It was coming closer, though ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ had no meaning here. Nevertheless, a sense of impending doom swelled inside of me.

  ‘Sixth!’ I yelped mentally. ‘Where are we? Why did the spell not send us back to the Den?’

  A deafening silence waited for me inside of my mind. Wherever Sixth had gone, she had vanished from my mind the moment I was transported into this new void. A sickening worry swelled inside of me. Had I inadvertently destroyed her somehow, but placing too much of a burden on her to hold the spell pattern?

  I didn’t have enough ‘time’ to find her. Even though each moment was the exact same point in time as the last, my doom was still getting closer. I could feel a countless number of iterations of myself, all of the versions that existed in the simultaneous and seemingly endless ‘now’. Each was just a little bit different from whatever I considered to be ‘myself’.

  The spell construct still hovered in my mind. I didn’t lose grasp on it, because there was no ‘time’ for it to unravel. With all the force of Intent that I could muster, I injected the remaining magic in my system into the woven intent.

  Out of infinite versions of myself, there were many outcomes. Some simply did not have enough magic, so the spell failed. Others were just a bit too panicked, so ill formed intent did not guide those me’s outside of this ‘nothing realm’. Yet more tried too urgently to recover Sixth from wherever she had gone.

  All of those variations failed to escape in time. I was destroyed, completely and utterly, in so many ways that recounting them would take longer than I had to live. A dragon’s power could do nothing to resist whatever it was that lay beyond the boundaries of reality. All I could do was flee.

  Out of all of those different versions of me, only one managed to complete the spell in time.

  I reappeared inside of my Den with a crack of arcane energy. Due to my haste, the spell dumped me in an unceremonious heap right on top of my treasure hoard. It was a bit bigger than I remembered it being, which also meant that landing on it was rather uncomfortable.

  Cassia, Visk, and Magnus all appeared alongside me. They dropped to the floor, thankfully far enough away that they weren’t immediately crushed when I fell. Coins and roughly hewn gems scattered across the smooth stone floor, making a gods-almighty racket.

  “Aaaaah-!” Cassia was in the middle of screaming when she hit the floor, knocking the air out of her. Visk on the other hand had been making a distinct whimper that I was just they would insist had never occurred. Similar to Cassia, whatever they had been doing was interrupted by being suddenly dropped.

  Poor Magnus just smacked into the ground and lay there in an unconscious heap. I hoped the short drop hadn’t injured him further. Sluggishly, I pulled myself to my feet and checked myself over. I seemed to have all of my physical pieces intact, but there was still a notable absence in my mind.

  My eyes landed on a bright pink crystal which had rolled out of the treasure pile when I landed on it. Like the others, it was a roughly hewn chunk that was barely more than a shiny rock. Those other gemstones did not have the vibrant glow which was pulsing out of the one in question. With great care, I reached over and picked the flashing crystal up between my claws. It had a familiar magical scent to it.

  ‘Sixth?’ I reached out mentally. I didn’t get an immediate response, but a deep sense of familiarity seeped into me from the gemstone. The manner in which it was flickering and pulsing with light could be characterized as ‘really annoyed’, which fit my sister’s personality perfectly.

  ‘-aaaaargh-why-won’t-this-stupid-rock-just-...!’ I heard inside my mind. It started as a whisper, but swiftly rose in volume as my sister grew more and more frustrated with her inability to communicate. ‘I’ll take this bloody rock and beat his head in with it I swear-’

  ‘Sixth, I can hear you,’ I interjected forcefully. Nearby, Cassia and Visk were picking themselves up off of the ground. My Huntress glanced my way, which made me shake my head subtly. A further nudge of my snout in Magnus’s direction indicated she should check on him. Cassia was getting some of the feedback from our connection, so she quickly understood that I needed to address this first.

  Cassia had been mortally terrified of whatever had been in the Void. While she didn’t have my predator’s instincts, she had her own natural senses. That alongside my complete feeling of powerlessness in the face of whatever that thing was, had shaken her deeply. If she’d not already gone through so many shocks lately, she might well have been incoherent right now. As things were, she numbly stumbled towards Magnus to make sure he was alright.

  ‘I- oh, there you are,’ Sixth replied with surprise. ‘Where did you go? I popped out here by myself as just a spirit. I’d have dissipated if I’d not latched onto this rock here.’

  ‘It’s Morganite.’ I blinked after I said that. I had absolutely no idea where the knowledge had come from. My eyes had landed on the shiny crystal, and the name ‘Morganite’ popped into my head along with small tidbits about how to carve it into a proper gemstone with my claws.

  Were dragons born just knowing that kind of thing? I wasn’t sure.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  ‘Morganite…?’ Sixth said, baffled for a moment. ‘Great, so I’m trapped inside a discount gemstone. That doesn’t answer where you just went. I don’t have free access to your senses anymore.’ Sixth sounded surprisingly miffed about that. She’d voiced her dislike for being trapped inside of me on more than one occasion. I supposed that at least while she was riding as a passenger, she’d been able to perceive the world through me.

  ‘It was… like the Void in the Tower, but far worse,’ I said carefully. Something about the knowledge of that place felt dangerous to even speak about. ‘Nothing existed except for me and the people I brought with me. Absolutely nothing… except for something horrendously powerful. I have no idea what it was, but I barely escaped with my life. I was… worried about you, when you were gone suddenly.’

  That seemed to shut Sixth up for a little bit. I could feel her ruminating from faint pulses of emotion that emanated from the gem. ‘That’s… strange. Maybe I didn’t understand something about the Magic Mirror correctly. There were some seemingly superfluous patterns involved, but I wonder if they were there to protect against something the maker didn’t fully understand…’

  My eyes tracked over to Visk. The elf was curled up in a little ball on the ground, hands over their head. They didn’t seem to be in any immediate distress. Visk was simply overwhelmed. Everyone had a threshold for how much stress they could handle before finally shutting down. It seemed that Visk had reached theirs.

  I’d have to make it up to both them and Cassia somehow. I owed them both a great debt for sticking with me through everything.

  ‘... I really hate to say this, but can you carry me around in your egg pouch?’ Sixth said after some further thought.

  ‘I’m sorry my what?’ I was genuinely flabbergasted by that request. For one thing, I didn’t even know that I had an ‘egg pouch’.

  ‘You’re kidding right?’ Sixth said incredulously. ‘You’ve used the darn thing before, idiot! It’s the little cavity underneath your tongue. How else do you think dragons carry our eggs around? In our claws?’

  That… that made a lot of sense, actually. I instinctively knew that the pocket inside of my mouth was for storing precious objects. It had frankly never occurred to me that the most precious object in existence would be a dragon’s egg. Anyone trying to steal it would have to stick their arm in a no doubt very angry dragon’s mouth. I didn’t think most people would be stupid enough to even attempt such a thing.

  ‘I suppose that will let us stay in contact with each other’, I said reluctantly. Having my sister ride around between my teeth felt vaguely… ‘off’. Uncomfortable to even think about. I couldn’t explain what the distinction was between having her there versus inside of my mind, but I was sure it existed.

  ‘Yeah yeah, I’m not thrilled about it either. Sitting in the pouch will help refine this dumb rock into something nice looking at least.’

  With no other options other than leaving Sixth lying around available for now, I relented. I took great care in opening my jaws wide and rolling back my tongue to open up the small cavity in my lower jaw. I’d not used it in a long while, so the muscles involved protested painfully at the sudden movement. The pink morganite was deposited inside by my claws and I carefully shut my mouth.

  ‘You okay-’ I started to ask, but Sixth interrupted me.

  ‘Shut it. If I have to describe what this feels like to you, I’ll puke. I don’t know how, but I will find a way.’

  I decided to shut up and leave Sixth to their misery as protective layers of mucus began to coat the crystal inside of my mouth. Soon enough, the faint discomfort which accompanied having a rock embedded in my lower jaw faded.

  With that settled, I turned my attention towards my Companions. Visk was still down for the count, but Cassia seemed to have collected herself enough to pick up Magnus from the ground. To my surprise, a small white raven was perched on top of the boy’s head.

  That was very strange, considering I was absolutely certain that I’d seen Mortimer’s one time familiar die. I’d been responsible for tearing his curse-warped flesh apart and I’d watched his spirit fade into nothingness. While I could recall seeing a white raven in the battle with the Vampyr, I’d been a little too focused on the monster to pay the bird much mind. I knew for sure that I’d not brought a raven with us, when I cast the teleportation spell.

  Yet here was ‘Archibald’, more or less the same as the first time I ever saw him.

  On closer inspection, there were subtle differences. The bird had acquired a single black feather over one of his eyes, which made him look like he was perpetually cocking an eyebrow. He also ‘smelled’ like Magnus’s magic now. For the moment, the Raven was standing guard over Magnus protectively as Cassia carried him towards the exit out of the Den.

  I supposed it wasn’t really the bird’s fault that his previous master had been such a terrible person. He seemed attached to Magnus in some as of yet undefined way. If he wanted to watch over the boy, I saw little reason to chase him off.

  Unless he decided to do something ‘evil’ again. Then I’d burn him to a crisp.

  “Visk, I have an order for you,” I rumbled to my Elf, who was still curled up in a ball on the floor. My voice seemed to have a magical effect on them. They shot to their feet almost quicker than I could follow and scurried over.

  “Yes Boss- Sanguine- I mean-,” They started to stammer over themself. My claw reached over and shushed them by gently pressing against their lips. I could see Visk’s ears fanning between fear, joy, and surprise with rapid twitches in different directions.

  “Visk,” I said softly. “Go get Edith. Make sure that she knows we are back and that she needs to tend to Magnus immediately. Then I want you to get Cassia and yourself some food. After that, go and get some rest. I am not going anywhere. Can you do these things for me?”

  While Visk had been ‘eager’ to do what I asked in the past, the sheer enthusiasm they put on display caused me a little bit of concern. I’d barely finished speaking before Visk disappeared from in front of me. They weren’t using stealth. Instead, the elf put on an incredible burst of speed to dart for the exit of the Den. I watched them overtake Cassia and sprint into the darkness a moment later.

  “... No wonder they manage to steal things from people mid-battle, if that’s how fast they can move when motivated,” I rumbled to myself.

  Some time later, I was laying on the floor of my Den by myself. Sixth was technically ‘present’, but when she wasn’t actively putting effort into communicating with me, she withdrew into her crystal. This was the first time I’d been ‘alone’ with my own thoughts in a long while.

  I wasn’t quite asleep yet, but it was approaching. Such an impactful change took time to get going. As I settled in, I became fully certain that when I slept, it would be for months. Upwards of a year, possibly. While I could only access my ‘Dream Den’ when I was fully asleep, I could get a general sense for the power moving around inside of me.

  For reference, when I battled my brother Third, I’d only received a portion of his total magical power. At my best estimate, I’d managed to collect something like a tenth of his total magical potential by consuming some of his Vitae through his flesh. If I’d been the one to kill him and consume his whole body, I would have received the complete amount.

  One tenth of the power in Third’s body had been enough to catapult me from just inside of an ‘adolescent’ stage of bodily growth to firmly in the ‘young adult’ stage. This was just a general guess on my part, based on instinctive memories of what a dragon ought to look like once it was fully grown. It had taken me days of involuntary slumber to process that change.

  During my time in Osteriath, I’d consumed an amount of magic that made what I’d gained from Third look like a mere flash in the pan. While I couldn’t accurately estimate just how much I’d managed to consume during my escapades, it was certainly enough to knock me unconscious for far longer than I’d have ever willingly agreed to.

  Part of the problem, as revealed by my internal examination, was the sheer variety of sources that the power had come from. I’d eaten many Wizards, magical artifacts, cursed spirits, and an ‘Elder’ Vampyr fighting my way up the Tower of Baedain. Those were all bad enough, but the dragon flames I’d sucked back into my body were the primary culprit.

  An entire city’s worth of magic had been on fire, and I’d just guzzled it down without properly thinking through the consequences. Inside of my body, the ‘golden spiral’ at my spirit's core was spinning as fast as it possibly could. Each moment, it shredded a torrent of consumed power and spat out golden Vitae from the other side. Even with it working as fast as possible, the never ending deluge I’d poured into myself would take months to work through.

  But, alas, I couldn’t keep it working as fast as possible. I could already feel the stress that my core was experiencing from trying to process so much Vitae at once. It would require extended periods of uninterrupted rest to recover. Each time I did recover, I’d be a little more powerful and therefore able to process the energy better. It would be a feedback loop, where processed Vitae helped me process yet more Vitae.

  If this was what all Dragons were capable of, no wonder my siblings had catapulted upwards in power while I’d lingered in weakness. They had all likely sought out the highest returns as quickly as possible to speed up their future growth, while I’d contented myself with surviving off of scraps of wildlife.

  I would be vulnerable while I slept, but once I fully awakened, I would be an entirely different threat from what I’d been before. That was a problem. If my siblings were watching me, they would no doubt wait until just after I’d dropped into my forced slumber to attack. I couldn’t imagine that they would let me rest peacefully, if I’d come out the other side more powerful than them.

  With that in mind, I used the time I had remaining to start mentally designing some defenses for my lair. While visiting Osteriath had cost me a great deal of time and suffering, I’d learned a lot from observing the human’s methods of approaching magic. If I handled it carefully, I was fairly certain that I could use my newfound power to leave some nasty surprises for any of my siblings that came to visit…