*The Aetherium - Realm of Dragons**Ten kilometers above the burning city*
Silenus the Wise felt the moment the child died.
Not just any child—the one who had been singing. The one whose voice had held a desperate harmony against the chaos, maintaining a bubble of order in the hurricane of destruction. Fourteen years old, the part of him that catalogued everything noted. Fourteen years, three months, six days. Brown hair with an unusual gold undertone. A small scar on her left hand from a childhood accident with a crystal shard.
He knew these details because Silenus remembered everything. Every face his ancient eyes had seen in four thousand years of existence. Every voice he'd heard silenced. Every light extinguished. The weight of it—four millennia of memory—gave his soul a Gravitas of 15, ancient and heavy enough to bend reality around it. Other dragons forgot. Silenus carried every moment like stones in his chest.
This was his gift. This was his curse.
"It is done," rumbled Aetherios the Sky-Lord, his voice like thunder given consciousness. The eldest of their kind, he flew at the head of their formation, his scales the white of bone aged by millennia. "The corruption is cleansed."
*Corruption.* The word tasted of ash in Silenus's mind. Below them, Crysillia—which had been a city of a hundred thousand souls mere minutes ago—was now a graveyard of crystal and light. The dragons' Desolation Song had done its work too well. Not just death, but transformation. The elves hadn't simply died; they had become part of their city's fundamental structure, their life force crystallized and shattered.
"The egg?" asked Pyrrhus the Young, and Silenus could hear the desperate hope in the youngest dragon's voice. At barely five hundred years, Pyrrhus still believed in justice, in cause and effect, in the possibility that their terrible act might yield the result they sought. His soul carried the flavor of smoke and ember, but now tainted with copper—the taste of regret that would never leave him. "Do we sense the egg?"
Nineteen minds reached out as one, searching the ruins below for any trace of their stolen child. Vash'nil, the first dragon born in three centuries, taken from his nest while still in the shell. The crime that had driven them to this atrocity.
Silence.
No trace of dragon essence. No whisper of their youngest's mind. Nothing but the echoes of elven souls transforming into crystal and the persistent, harmonic death-song of a city that didn't yet realize it was dead.
"They hid it well," growled Umbra the Night-Wing, her scales so black they seemed to absorb light. "The elven thieves—"
"Were not here," Silenus said quietly.
All eighteen other dragons turned to him in the air, their formation breaking. The Aetherium itself—that realm of pure air and thought where dragons dwelt—seemed to hold its breath.
"Explain," Aetherios commanded, and in that single word was the weight of absolute authority.
Silenus gestured with one wing toward the dying city below. "I have observed every death. Catalogued every face. The delegation that came to our realm six moons ago—the ones we suspected of the theft—none of them were in Crysillia."
"Impossible," hissed Thargolion the Burned, his scales still bearing the scars of an ancient battle with the Phoenix Lords. "Our divinations—"
"Our divinations were wrong." The words came from Vashtirel the Seer, and her voice was hollow with the kind of horror that comes from seeing too late. Her pearl-colored scales rippled with distress. "I see it now. The veil of deception falls away only after the deed is done. We were... we were..."
"Deceived," Silenus finished. "We were deceived."
The word hung in the air like a curse. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of glass breaking—not the physical destruction below, but the metaphysical shattering of certainty. Every dragon heard it, that distinctive note of truth cracking under the weight of revelation.
Dragons did not make mistakes. They were too old, too wise, too powerful. They had watched empires rise and fall, had seen the patterns of history repeat and diverge. They *knew* things with the certainty of creatures who had lived long enough to see cause become effect become cause again.
And yet.
"Who?" Pyrrhus asked, and his young voice cracked with something that might have been the beginning of guilt. "Who could deceive the Nineteen? Who has such power?"
"The question," Silenus said slowly, his mind sorting through four millennia of memories, "is not who has the power. It is who would benefit from our rage being directed at Crysillia."
Below them, the last of the great towers fell. The Tower of Eternal Harmony, which had been built from a single, perfect crystal grown over seven centuries, crumbled into dust that sang its swan song as it dispersed on the wind.
"The child," whispered Vashtirel, her seer's eyes going wide with terrible understanding. "The child who survived."
"What child?" Aetherios demanded.
Vashtirel's wings trembled. "In the ruins below. I see... I see one who still breathes. One who was touched by our song but not destroyed. One who even now absorbs the corruption we have sown."
Nineteen ancient minds focused downward, searching. And there—in what had been the Academy, beneath tons of crystallized matter—a spark of life. Faint. Changing. But undeniably *there*.
"Impossible," Umbra breathed. "Nothing survives the Desolation Song."
"Nothing *should* survive," Silenus corrected. "But then, today is a day for impossible things. We who do not err have erred. We who cannot be deceived have been deceived. Why not one more impossibility?"
The nineteen dragons circled once more over the ruins of Crysillia, their shadows passing over crystal graves and singing dust. Behind them, in the ruins of a perfect city, something that had been an elf named Ora began to change.
The dragons felt it in their bones—a wrongness that went deeper than guilt, sharper than shame. They had been the instruments of deception, played like the crystal chimes of the city they had just destroyed.
And somewhere, perhaps, someone was laughing.
But it was not the laughter of joy or even of cruelty. It was the laughter of something that had waited a very long time to see the proud brought low, the mighty made foolish, the wise made murderers.
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*End Chapter 2*
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