Thrall - Christie Golden [39]
Ysera was awakened, but still unfocused and unclear, and had, according to what he could learn from her flight, gone wandering. Nozdormu had been missing for some time. Alexstrasza, shattered by Krasus’s betrayal, had vanished as well. Malygos was slain, and Deathwing was loose in the world, plotting the destruction of all of them.
Even the oldest among them admitted that not since Deathwing’s initial betrayal had there been such a time of despair and chaos.
Each flight had withdrawn unto itself. Kalec had friends among most of them, but even contact with them had been laden with tension. While the green, red, and bronze flights did not know where their Aspects might be, they at least had living ones. The blues did not, and their focus in these last few days had been in rectifying that.
The blues had converged on the Nexus, the site that had always been their home. There, in their cold caves, there had been a great deal of talk, and analyzing, and theorizing, and discussion of magical protocol. But very little had actually been done.
Kalecgos thought his flight was much more interested in the theory of how they might go about creating or choosing a new Aspect than in the pressing need for one. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. The blues loved intellectual challenges. It was only their contempt for the “lesser races” that prevented them from—as the late Krasus had done—adopting different forms to mingle with other users of magic such as the Kirin Tor magi. Arcane magic—cold and intellectual—was their birthright, thanks to the titans’ decision to make Malygos the Aspect of Magic in this world. The younger races, really, had no business meddling in it, according to those who thought this way. And too many of them did for Kalec’s comfort.
There seemed to be as many different proposals for how creating or selecting a new Aspect would occur as there were blue dragons themselves. Or, Kalec amended, nostrils flaring in annoyance, as many different proposals as there were scales on each dragon.
An early fear had been quickly calmed when one of the younger blues had asked worriedly, “What if there can be no new Aspect? The titans made Malygos into the Aspect of Magic. What if only the titans can make another, and the other flights have forever doomed us to living without an Aspect?”
The older dragons had shaken their heads, completely unconcerned. “We all know that the titans were very powerful, and very wise,” one of them had said. “We must assume that they anticipated this might one day happen. Our scholars are certain that, with enough research, they will be able to discover what we should do.”
Kalecgos believed this; he believed in the wisdom of the titans, who had charged all the Aspects so very long ago. Other blues, though, believed more in the superiority and capability of the blue flight itself. They could not possibly fail to come up with something. They certainly did not lack for theories.
According to legend, when the Aspects were first created, the moons had been in a rare conjunction. A repeat of this same alignment, not seen for centuries, was due to occur in just a few days. One popular theory, which played to the sense of the dramatic, espoused that this celestial event was of import to their task. Some felt it was “crucial to the proper working of the magic necessary to facilitate the alteration of a normal blue into an Aspect”; others simply deemed it good timing.
Others wanted a majority of blues present at the ceremony. “We will have an Aspect, one way or another,” one of the more pragmatic magical scholars had said. “If there is no physical transformation bestowed by the conjunction of the two moons, at the very least we can decide, as a flight, who we think would be our best leader.”
“Too, it is not as if the great Malygos died without leaving those of his brood behind,” Arygos had said. “I myself am a child of Malygos and his prime consort. It could well be that the ability to become