Only then did he lift his head, seeking through the air, looking to all horizons to see if there was any sign of more fire dragons. Only the sun shared the sky with him, and once again he had that eerie thought—the blazing orb remained directly overhead, stubbornly refusing to move from the zenith. Finally he too landed, creeping into the lair to curl up in a dark, moist alcove of the cave. Gently Aeren licked at the horrible wounds that scarred Toxy’s flanks, while she lowered her head and breathed out a mournful sigh.
At last they slept, for how long Aeren couldn’t tell. He awakened with a groggy return to consciousness, aching in every nerve. Despite the pain, he crawled to the entrance to peer outside. The sunlight still beat straight down outside the cave, though he found it hard to believe that they had slumbered through a full day. Still, he felt a little stronger, and the pain in his neck and wings had diminished considerably with the rest.
“Stay here,” he whispered as his companion moaned.
She shook her head in reply, lifting her sinuous neck.
“We have to get help,” she said. “This is a danger that is greater any we have ever seen, greater by far than the threats of metal dragons or of the lances that pierce and kill.”
“What should we do?” Aeren asked.
“You go north... seek more greens, and the blues, too, if you can find them. Tell them of these fire dragons and bring them here.”
“And you?”
“I will go south... there, too, I hope to find greens. And beyond that, there may be white dragons living in the realms of ice. I will bring them, and in all our numbers, we will fly against the Storms of Chaos.”
Aeren wanted nothing more than to hide, to wait inside his lair and hope that the awful storm would pass. But somehow now, confronted by Toxyria’s strength and determination, he couldn’t allow himself to cower away from the world. The pain of his burns was a chorus of agony, seeming to penetrate everywhere through his body. Fear numbed, almost paralyzed him, but he would force himself to be strong for her.
“This is a good plan,” Aeren agreed. “But be careful. Now that I have found you, I should grieve to lose you.”
She blinked, leather lids drooping over her slitted eyes in a touching gesture of affection. “I will be careful—and you do the same, won’t you?”
Aeren nodded and gently nuzzled the female’s long snout. Finally the two dragons took to the air, soaring over the forests of Qualinesti. Toxyria disappeared, following the coastline south, and Aeren flew in the opposite direction. His goal was specific: He had seen the blue dragons rising from an encampment to the north, and now he went to seek them. Though they had not been in the sky recently, they could certainly have been waiting, hiding on the ground. Distrustful and admittedly afraid of his kin-dragons, he had not been bold enough to check as far as their lair.
Now, for Toxy, he would.
All the while the sun stood high in the sky, red and implacable, shining downward with radiation of powerful, unforgiving heat. The vault of the heavens was an expanse of deathlike pallor, white, hot, and dead. The pain in Aeren’s burned limbs soon returned, but he ignored the discomfort, emboldened by the knowledge that Toxy, who had been hurt even worse than he, had somehow found the courage to fly forth.
At times the green dragon bellowed aloud, braying the distress call of a chromatic dragon, a cry that should have brought any of his kin-dragons in earshot flying to the rescue. But he saw no sign of scale nor wing, nothing to disturb the relentless sameness of the forest. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose from the woodland and seemed to promise that elsewhere, too, there were attackers of chaos and fire wreaking their destruction upon the helpless world. Once, far away, he saw a conical mountain, spires of jagged rock rising from the steep slopes, while a curious swath of darkness seemed to seethe and writhe around its base. The place had an eerie sense of menace, and he circled wide, giving it a broad berth as he continued his search.
He found several camps of the blue dragons, but these were abandoned and—judging from the dried droppings the green dragon inspected—looked to have been vacated several days earlier. Of the human knights who had brought these dragons here, there was no sign, and Aeren concluded that the dragons and their riders had all departed in response to some command from their distant and unknown masters. They had gone, leaving this part of the world to the mercies of the Chaos storm. It seemed obvious that if this forest was to survive, Aeren himself would have to play a large role in protecting it.
The green dragon calculated that he searched for many hours, even for more than a day, but always the sun remained immobile, fixed and glaring as it scorched him, scalded the poor forest even as it seared the wounded flesh on the green dragon’s back, neck, and shoulders. Sometimes Aerensianic wondered if the fires he saw in the distance were caused merely by the dryness of the woods, the helpless tinder yielding to conflagration upon the first spark. But he readily recalled the unnatural horror inspired by the blazing, spark-trailing dragons, and in his heart, he knew this was not the case, knew that the forces that had attacked Toxy and himself were striking everywhere upon the world.
Finally he circled back, winging southward again, flying toward the rendezvous at the oceanside lair. His course again took him within sight of the same conical peak he had seen earlier, and once more he noticed the broad swath of unnatural darkness. Biting back his fear, Aeren cast his spell of invisibility over himself and resolved to investigate the strange phenomenon.
Unseen by anyone on the ground, he soared close to the jagged bluff and noticed that the sides of the mountain were teeming with elves. Still cloaked by concealing magic, he winged through a wide circle, looking around. He noticed griffons flying through the air, circling over the summit... and among those fliers, he was startled to see a creature of silver-feathered wings, a griffon unlike any other in the world.
More frightening, and unnatural in the same bizarre manner as the dragons of fire, he saw that the shadows at the base of the hill were thick and alive, seething with a motion like angry waves. Aeren’s blood chilled at the sight of them, and he knew that these were beings of Chaos, every bit as deadly and unnatural as the burning serpents. The dark shapes swarmed around the hill, thick in the woods, projecting an unmistakable aura of chill and death.
And like the fire dragons, they seemed to indicate nothing so much as the very end of the world.
Finally Aerensianic glided southward, following the coastline back to the lair he had found in the sea cave. In places, he passed forests that had been decimated by fires, and then he would fly beside long swaths of still pristine woodlands. So far as he could tell, he was the only dragon in this part of Krynn.
Eventually he recognized the spit of land just north of his cave, and he dived, anxious to return to the lair, hoping that Toxyria would be here as well. He came to rest on the rocks of the shoreline and ducked his head into the cavern.
“Toxy?” he asked with a hopeful snort.
Only then did he catch a whiff of the sulfurous taint of soot and smoke, unnatural evidence of flame in this moist environment. With a reflexive leap, he sprang into the air, barely avoiding the gout of fire that exploded outward from his lair. Straining his huge wings, the green dragon rose, desperately gaining altitude, pulling away from the ambush that had been laid for him.
He banked and flew along the coastline for a few strokes, then caught an updraft and rose higher, away from the surf and beyond the crest of the coastal bluff. His mind was torn by fear, anguished by one question: Had Toxyria returned and been slain in the lair by the hateful wyrms of fire?