The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Sixteen

"Of course once you've eaten you'll need to rest. It's best not to start a long journey with one's head clouded from a sleepless night." Ausfela sighed as if this were the most unfortunate of facts and rose slowly to her feet. "I'm guessing you brought a meal for yourselves? At least I hope you did. I don't have much in the way of human food. I hardly have anything in the way of dragon food either, after all these years. Luckily, depending on how you look at it, dragons can go a very, very long time on very little food. I have more or less hibernated away entire centuries, dozing lightly in case you were born and grew up and arrived, but dozing all the same. And I guess I shouldn't say I've been entirely without provisions or entirely trapped below ground. Rarely, I've snuck from my lair to do a bit of hunting in the dead of night."

Lina raised an eyebrow at this news. This dragon, it seemed, had a flair for the dramatic if she'd gone on about being trapped underground for years, when she had been making trips above ground. This news considerably brightened her thoughts, however, since obviously there was a way out from this space deep within the mountains.

The dragon began to walk slowly away from them, motioning first with a tilt of her head that they should follow. "We'd best go this way. There are some human sized tables. And beds as well. We aren't entirely without creature comforts for your kind here."

"We have questions." Quara said the words as she trailed after the dragon, glancing back one last time over her shoulder at the staircase that had led them into the chamber

"I'm sure you do, Child. And I have answers. Although I'm not sure, after all this time here that I have as many answers as you have questions. I have, on occasion, been able to get information from the world above, but not in a long while. It's not as though I see anyone on my night hunts. But the main thing is that you're here now and we have to get up above ground."

"Above ground?" Quara's voice sounded oddly strangled as though she were battling a wave of panic and failing to subdue it.

"You couldn't have imagined that we were going to save the world from the safety of this cave, did you?"

"I didn't really imagine that we were going to save the world at all. I mean I know you said it a moment ago, but I thought that maybe you were exaggerating." Quara shook her head. "How can we save the world if we don't even know what we're saving it from?"

"You will know. Once you're settled and eating. Why don't you tell me while we're walking what you already know? What do you girls know of the world above ground and about why you've spent your entire lives hidden away in caves?"

Quara turned the question over in her mind as she followed behind Ausfela, linking arms with Lina who was silent for the first time since they'd began their adventure earlier that morning. "We have a history class and we've studied the stories of the wars that took place above ground, before the Caverns were sealed away. We know that once, so long ago that no one remembers his name, there was a good king who ruled nearly all of the known world. But he was killed by an evil king and that evil king has sat on the thrown for hundreds of years, although no one really knows how he's gone on living for quite so long."

Ausfela was shaking her head slowly from side to side, but Quara ignored her and continued. "Our family was from the plains. Our ancestors were some of the only people who managed to escape from the massacres that took place there. They made it here and brought news of the death and destruction that had swept the land. They said that entire cities were blotted out, their names nearly forgotten although a decade earlier they had built delicate spires that reached up towards the heavens, because there was no one left to remember what they had once been called."