The dragons were always there.
For those who built their homes in the shadows of the northern mountains, the dragons were always there. Just beyond the peaks, just out of sight, in their wasted valleys just beyond—the dragons were always there.
In the great cities to the south, at the center of the Great Wood, where the giant Lorelai trees grew in groves of forty and fifty—the People there could forget. They built their towers and gardens; they flew in safe, open skies. And the dragons were little more than proverb—the stuff of history lessons and bedtime stories.
But to the People who built their villages in the distant, smaller groves at the edges of the Wood, the dragons were always there.
Paladin understood. Living alone, his farm atop a Lorelai tree in the shadows of the mountains, he heard the dragons’ cries . He saw their fiery shadows dance against the nighttime sky. And he walked through empty hallways, past darkened rooms, and amid the silent whispers of those whose lives had been lost to those dragons that were always there.
He was in the sky. Wings extended, the winds pushing against his feathers, he soared like a hawk. The branches of the Lorelai tree were long out of reach. And the canopy of the lesser trees, thousands upon thousands feet below, remained unseen—hidden by the evening mists.
