Book One: Onnu and Pannu

Pannu

Pannu wanted to rush to the site immediately, but David was just cresting the horizon. He would have to wait until morning to see what had become of the two dragons. He didn't know how he would sleep, but he had to try. They would be greatly wounded when he reached them--if they survived at all.
   He tried not to think about the possibility. He'd seen his mate do all sorts of amazing things in the time he'd known her. If nothing else, she must live.
   He forgot that Trey was the same kind of dragon.
   He didn't know that there were only three of them, either. He didn't know a lot of things about them. He did know that she'd kept things from him, had done from the day they met, but it didn't matter now. Worry erased every harsh word, every secret she'd held. Worry painted her in a better light than he'd cast mere minutes ago.
   He'd heard the roar, of course. He shouldn't have, but he had. They all had. The primal sound bounced off of the mountains to the north and east, and all of their crystals jangled with painful discord. He didn't know that it was only in their two Holds that the crystals clanged the worst, and it wasn't just because they were the closest. No, the crystals of a Hold were attuned to the dragon or dragons who claimed them. They reacted to her distress, and his.
   He'd watched them fall, helpless to do anything. Even if he knew how she'd rescued him when he fell, that had been horizontal. He didn't know how to stop a nearly vertical plummet. That wasn't counting the size difference. While he was the largest a normal dragon could grow, there were still many feet left over to equal just one of them.
   He paced the length of the Bowl until he had to cover the hatchlings. They'd grown too large for any niche, but were still too small to be left on their own. He didn't have to worry about stepping on anyone, because they'd all huddled in their beds as soon as Sighting was sounded. That, coupled with the Roar Heard Round the Verse, sent them fleeing at top speed. Their Hold's kin still remembered the sound of a laughing Charon, after all.
   All night, he worried. He replayed his last words to her, the last thing the other dragon had said, and wondered what any of it meant. He seemed to say that Onnu would live a very long time. But... didn't all dragons? Did he mean that their kind of dragon had a longer lifespan than the rest? How much longer? Twice as long? That didn't really mean much when he didn't even know how long he would live. What it did mean was that he wasn't one of the special few dragons Onnu had spoken of at the Hatching Day afterparty.
   About halfway through Charon's Pass, it hit him like a fist to the gut:
   She was one of those dragons.
   She would outlive him.
   Would she outlive their children? Their grandchildren? She would have to watch everyone who made Crossing die, at the very least.
   Including him.
   In that moment, he understood why they might want to end it.
   Then the hatchlings twitched in their sleep, and he decided that she couldn't be dead. She wouldn't leave Sage, Stone, and Sunny without a mother. She'd chuckled for several minutes, the day they'd given them their first names. Even if they changed them, if they never knew what their names meant, it tickled her that they'd named the boys Sage and Stone.
   "They're the right colors. We have to!" she'd laughed.
   Sunny lived up to her name, and was the first to be named. She smiled all the time, and was even now likely smiling in her sleep. 
   Well, maybe not tonight. She heard what happened, same as the rest of us. He was ashamed to realize that he'd barely looked at their children while he was pacing, so he didn't know if they were as worried as he was.
   Worried or not, they were still toddlers. They slept more than their father did. When Charon's Pass was over, they tugged at his earflaps and nares incessantly until he grumbled awake.
   When memory settled in, he apologized and launched out of the Hold, nearly in one move. The gryphons nearby knew to watch over the hatchlings while he was gone, even if they were nearly twice the size of the gryphons by now. They'd learned to listen to them, on pain of cuffing by one of their parents, and the gryphons would tell them if they acted out.
   Pannu started out flapping like mad, but his wings faltered as he got close enough to see the wreckage. The sapphire and opal crystals were steaming in the morning sunlight, obscuring the remains within. Had he thought that word consciously, he would have amended it to "the remains of the land within." There was little coherent thought in his mind, looking upon the wreckage of rock and crystal.
   He hovered uncertainly, hesitant to descend into the...
   That's a Hold down there! A brand-new Hold! Is that how they were made?!
   Pannu wouldn't have sacrificed two dragons for one new Hold, no matter how crowded it was getting as their populations expanded.
   But no, they can't be dead. She can't be dead. She said Holds were made to protect the little kin. Dragons wouldn't die to make them, right?
   The logic calmed his mind enough to peer through the eerie fog that clung to the crystals. He searched between the spires for a glimpse of movement. He was so focused, he didn't notice how close he got, until he was directly above the hole in the middle of the Hold spires. He could have fit both dragons within the eye of the crater, but true to the other Holds, it was much wider within.
   The mist thinned here, enough to see two large shapes below: one dark, and one light. They lay like two broken halves of a yin yang, only their heads touching. They seemed to have fallen head first, and their bodies flung out from that center point on impact.
   He couldn't tell, from this height, if they were breathing.