AuRon heard the trolls’ lung-flaps working harder in the smoke.

“Get them out!” he shouted at the trolls. They just stood there. He took out his horn and started blasting.

Imfamnia charged out of the smoke, blood smearing down her forehead, and AuRon saw her hindquarters lash around as the trolls dragged them outside.

He saw Imfamnia with the crystal staff in her hand. She hurled it like a spear at Rayg, an unnatural motion for a dragon but a perfectly sound one for a hominid. The staff broke and the Lavadome lurched in the air, tilted.

Suddenly everything was groaning and cracking in the tower. AuRon scrambled to push Natasatch out, dragging a troll.

“Rayg, when you built that tower, I imagine you thought it would always sit on a level surface.”

The Lavadome shifted back level again. The tower didn’t cease groaning, however, and pieces of masonry and jets of dust shot from the bottom two levels.

He heard a pained cry from Imfamnia.

The air above was full of whirling bats, disturbed by the change in the light in the Lavadome, AuRon guessed. Flocks like clouds circled about the gardens. The vermin had multiplied in the years of the Lavadome’s neglect.

Rayg staggered out and into the bats.

“Revenges! Revenges for our Tyr and our dark!” they squeaked, covering him in flapping wing and fur. Just like his brother, AuRon thought, to inspire such loyalty in vermin.

A cloud of bats whirled overhead like a living tornado. The funnel reached down . . .

AuRon lashed out sideways with a saa. Now that he knew where to hit a troll, it was easy to detach the sense-orb.

The remaining troll, waving those oversized, overmuscled, dragon-killing arms, staggered through the cloud of bats, its sense organ covered in a bag of brown balls of hair and leathery wings. The bats in the air around it dodged its blows as easily as they circumnavigated stalactites. It plunged off the edge of Imperial Rock with a last surprised hoot.

The tower gave a final shudder and fell in on itself blam blam blam blam! as each floor collapsed into the other. Metallic shrieks and the sound of glass breaking added to the noise.

The tower’s collapse shocked Rayg and Imfamnia out of their duel. “Hurry, before the Firemaids find us!” Rayg said.

Infamnia came to her senses, picked up Rayg, and threw herself into the air, out over the edge of the Imperial Rock. But there are disadvantages to not being born a dragon but living within one. She forgot to check her wings before trying to fly. A cut tendon left a third of one wing flapping. They both followed the troll off the edge.

“How did the bats know?” Natasatch asked.

“I imagine Nilrasha or my brother told them.”

The Lavadome belonged to the dragons again. And the bats, of course.

Epilogue

Years later—not too many, at least not in the reckoning of a long life of a dragon—Wistala and DharSii established themselves in the old Queen’s Eyrie; Nilrasha’s Needle, a few roving hunters called it.

A new Dragon-Hominid alliance, the Chartered Trust—drawn up by dwarfs and based on legalistic elven political philosophy—had replaced the Empire. No one much liked the compromises, for the dragons had to hand over much of the precious metal they’d accumulated and the hominids agreed that the dragons would keep their Upper World estates and vast hunting preserves.

The Lavadome had come to rest back in the crater it rose from, though not quite as deep. With so much sun coming in, it was a cheerier place, but a great deal of work had to be done to even restore an exit where you could just walk up a path rather than do a twisting, turning scramble thorough rock and slag.

Neither her Copper brother nor Nilrasha was ever found. They certainly never came to claim their remote refuge. DharSii assumed she was still dragging him toward the last place they’d been seen heading, the river ring, when the cataclysm struck. Their bodies might be buried under the better part of what had been the Lavadome’s mountain, or they might have been burned in molten rock, or even scalded and swept away by the steaming waters.

Still, rumors persisted that they’d survived. A story gained currency among Hypatian dragon-fanciers and historians that some blighters in Bant had helped a mated pair open an old, forgotten exit to the Lavadome for a pair of crippled and grounded dragons, and showed copper and green scale to prove it. But the blighters of the savannah were notorious for creating juicy and mysterious tales to tell travelers by the fireside, in the hope of hiring more scouts to lead them to elephant graveyards, lost diamond mines, or even a former Tyr of Dragons and his family in their spacious cave overlooking the crashing sea.

Yes, as if rumor of survival wasn’t enough, the notoriously barren Nilrasha had supposedly had a clutch. Of course, Aethleethia had spent a lifetime being thought eggless, and she and NaStirath had produced two clutches and thought they might have one more in them.

Wistala liked the solitude. Only a dragon could easily cross the rocky, thickly wooded hills, cut deep by a tangle of rushing streams and rivers. The altitude made for a comfortable climate, just cool enough in the evenings to be invigorating and make a cozy bed welcome, but Wistala and DharSii weren’t so high that frost often touched them. The sunsets were spectacular. There was desert country far off on the other side of the Inland Ocean, DharSii told her, and the blowing winds threw up sand, coloring the sky to the west. Leave it to DharSii to explain away beauty and joy with talk of types of sand and prevailing local winds.

They were happy, busy years for those of the Trust. Wistala and DharSii were minor figures in this new Age of Foundations, as some were calling it. DharSii had attempted to name it an Age of Reason, but that never caught on with people trying to build homes by picking through rubble, or reclaiming fields from quick-growing pines and birches.

A colony of elves had gathered at their old seaside home not too far away. One of Rainfall’s “daughters” was training dolphins to herd schools of fish, much as human shepherds used dogs.

On what felt like the other side of the world, in the Sadda-Vale, old Scabia finally had a court. The dragons of the Empire who weren’t interested in mixing with hominids in the bubbling cauldron of activity that was the Age of Salvage had sought respite there. Art, memorials to old glories, and long-but-sparing meals gave her a chance to exercise her manners. Wistala had no doubt that NaStirath’s jokes found a receptive audience and Aethleethia could speak of the doings of hatchlings to her hearts’ content.

The dwarfs had reclaimed the old river roads deep underground, and claimed they could move cargo from south to north and back again faster than a dragon could travel. Of course their formula used a weight favorable to the tunnel ships rather than one that might be carried in the air or borne on the ground, but then dwarfs always did shape and color the truth much as their shaded glass might shape or color light.

Her old friends in the north were enjoying their new position at the crossroads of the world. The great river going to the Red Mountains now rivaled the Falnges in river traffic, with elves and dwarfs at both the headwaters and the mouth of the river and humans in between. The trolls’ old cave was the midpoint in a long stair that brought goods up from a new wharf. From there, commerce moved north and south on Rainfall’s old road. Rainfall’s old estate was now a lodge, village, and temple. From his hall, Thane Ragwrist bought and sold vast herds of horses and larger beasts for pulling loads.

As for the dragons, the great halls they’d built in Hypatia were still standing, but thanks to losses in the Second Civil War only a few were still occupied. “Free Wings” of mercenary dragons had a few, with a dozen or so fighting dragons and dragon-dames and their mates. Others were now temples of the Hypatian gods, or cavernous “exchanges” where goods or contracts for future products were bought or sold. NoSohoth’s colossal palace, with its deep holes for his wealth, was now Hypatia’s major financial concern, and the mild-mannered but avaricious old majordomo of the royal family was trying to reestablish a trade in spices and silks with the Great East so he might own the other half of the world as well, but rumor had it that some canny old eastern dragon was beating him at his game.

“I think dragons will do better in Hypatia than anywhere else, for all that I’m sympathetic to the ‘reclusives,’ ” DharSii said. “The Hypatian concept of citizenship could work to their advantage. They would get the protection of Hypatian law, and even if the duties of money prove onerous to a family with gold-hungry hatchlings to feed, by their size and power they could choose service.”

As for AuRon’s old blighters, they had expanded into the Ironrider lands and broken up into quarreling factions. Many had become nomads in the fashion of the old Ironriders, and a few tribal leaders were building tall chariots to draw them. To DharSii’s mind, they might one day prove a threat to the more civilized worlds east, west, and south. AuRon and Natasatch were back with their surviving family in Old Uldam, trying to build an alliance with the princedoms with the help of Hieba. Wistala wished them luck.

“But that’s long in the future,” DharSii said. “We may not live to see it, and we certainly won’t take any important part in it, even if we still can fly at that age. I think we’re done with great wars, for now. It’s been three generations of men since there’s been any real peace, and I believe the world’s ready for a respite.”