His voice resonated inside the hovering circle of light, the sound remaining trapped within it. The Lord Cymrian reached into his pocket, removed a coin minted with his own aspect and tossed it on the earthen floor outside the protective spinning light. It landed without sound; satisfied, he continued his address. “We know we are facing war—what is at question is the scale of it, and who is allied against us. Each of us holds a piece of that answer, and it is critical that we have as much of the puzzle as we can know before we put our defenses in place. We must ascertain whether what is coming is a war of conquest, driven by the greed of men, or if it is something far darker, more ancient, which has always loomed in the distance. Rhapsody, Namer that she is, has the power to not only record the words for posterity, but to help derive additional meaning from them once they are laid out for her. She has canted a circle of protection to keep our words secret from any ear that could hear them, hiding us all from any eye that could see within our council chamber. She will now remain silent, concentrating on each of our stories. I will speak first.” He turned slightly toward Anborn. “My father, your brother Llauron, is dead, Uncle,” he said softly, his voice emotionless. “Worse, he has Ended, forsaking all of his draconic lore as the Progenitor did, in a final act of protection of Rhapsody and our child, his grandson.” He waited, allowing the import of his words to sink in. Anborn stared at him for the span of seventy heartbeats. “The shield of the world is compromised,” he said finally. “This is grave news indeed.” Gwydion Navarne blinked but said nothing. It never failed to amaze him how passionlessly the members of the royal Cymrian dynasty were able to absorb tidings about the deaths of their family members, especially given the history of a thousand years or more that they shared. It might have caused him to believe that as humans with dragon blood, or wyrmkin, they were incapable of emotion, except that he himself had witnessed their desolation in the loss of others. He had seen firsthand the grief of Ashe when Rhapsody was missing or away, and the agony Anborn underwent following the death of his man-at-arms and friend, Shrike, a lowly soldier. It was a puzzle he not only could not decipher, but one whose very pieces were invisible to him. Then again, he mused, maybe it was more a matter of the deceptions they had perpetrated on each other over the centuries. Both Ashe and Llauron had been forced, or chosen, to feign their own deaths, to remain hidden from the sight of the living world for years. Perhaps this lack of loss was the price of that. “Additionally, I was unable to find my great-grandmother, Elynsynos, who would most certainly have been there if she were able,” Ashe continued. He looked askance at Rhapsody, whose eyes glistened with tears, but whose face remained stoic otherwise. “My own ability to discern her presence is limited to a range of approximately five miles, but there is such a patent lack of ethereal energy in the air, such a loss of lore from the forest ground, that I fear the worst.” Anborn’s face whitened noticeably. Gwydion felt the air in the room become suddenly drier, more caustic. “Gods,” he whispered. “If that be true, then with her death and that of Llauron, the Great White Tree is now unguarded, and the lands that once were her domain—most of the western continent, even unto Tyrian in the south—are no longer under draconic protection.” His hand shook slightly as he traced the area. “For all that humans do not even discern that wyrms protect the very ground on which they walk, the loss of both of them will leave a good deal of the Alliance vulnerable, should there be F’dor about.”