Chương 137: 05. Great Dragon 3

Ignicia flicked her tail with notable displeasure.

"I said it's an apology."

"What you say has limited bearing on reception." I massaged my temples, feeling the headache that altitude had temporarily suppressed creeping back with renewed vigor.

"When humans see a fire dragon flying toward a border marquis, their first thought isn't she must come bearing sincere goodwill. Their first thought is: we're next." She was quiet for half a beat, apparently evaluating whether my reasoning was too foolish to warrant refutation. In the end, she only made a thoroughly impatient sound.

"You short-lifers are so tiresome."

"Agreed, and I won't contest it." I gripped the least-scalding section of neck scales available—which was a relative distinction at best—and said through clenched teeth: "But the issue is that Cliffhold Fortress is not Typhon Fortress. Typhon could at least be framed as border tension and preemptive miscalculation.

If the capital sees a fire dragon fly directly overhead, that's not miscalculation—that's city-wide alarm bells, the royal court overturning tables, and the entire Imperial Guard collectively drafting their wills."

"Exaggeration."

"Not remotely." I gave no ground.

"You just dropped a bag of money on Margrave Frank and he nearly drove his helmet through the flagstones. If you personally fly over Cliffhold Fortress claiming you want to apologize to His Majesty face-to-face—" I paused, earnestly providing the conclusion.

"That's not an apology, Your Highness. That's offering the entire royal capital an opportunity for simultaneous cardiac arrest." Ignicia turned her head, fixing me with those excessively golden vertical pupils. Even in dragon form, the impatience in that look was unmistakably, characteristically her.

"So what do you want me to do?" she demanded.

"Stand outside the city walls and roar for your king to come out himself?"

"That's only marginally better than flying directly inside."

"Marginally?"

"Yes. Marginally. Approximately the difference between formal declaration of war and premium-grade threat display." She was displeased again. I could actually feel heat coiling in her throat—suggesting she was strongly considering demonstrating that she had no interest in formal classifications of any kind. I spoke quickly, before she could make that point with fire.

"Hear me out. The safest approach: don't approach the capital in dragon form at all. Find somewhere outside the city—safe ground, sufficient distance. You shift to human form, I go ahead and announce you properly. At minimum, let the palace know that what's arriving today is the Dragon Kingdom's princess—not the southern catastrophe that sprouted wings and decided to pay the Imperial capital a follow-up visit."

"Enter your capital in human form?" Her tone was saturated with disdain for the inconvenience.

"Like a thief."

"That's not acting like a thief." I kept my expression perfectly level.

"That's preventing the entire capital from holding its own funeral in advance." She stared forward, wings cutting steadily through the high clouds. After a moment, she replied almost absently:"Human rules. Fragile and excessive."

"Thank you. I live inside them every day. I'm painfully aware." She seemed on the verge of laughing, didn't quite get there, and settled for a very quiet sound through her nose. I thought, briefly, that this constituted something resembling progress. Then I saw it. On the horizon ahead—a point of fire flared to life. Not sunlight. A signal beacon. Something cold settled in my chest. A watchtower, positioned along a mountain ridge.

Either our shadow had been too obvious in the morning light, or a massive crimson dragon passing beneath the clouds was simply impossible to disguise as ordinary weather. Either way, the watchman in that tower had clearly chosen to transmit fire dragon sighted heading north via the fastest, simplest method available. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Worse still, the first beacon had barely flared before the second ignited, then the third, lighting off in rapid succession along the ridgeline and post roads like a chain of bad news someone had deliberately set alight. I watched those fires appear one after another and understood with unappealable clarity that the situation had begun sliding toward a different—and considerably more catastrophic—category of disaster. Typhon Fortress had been localized chaos.

But once this information traveled north via beacon and dispatch road, only one thing would reach Cliffhold Fortress: A dragon is heading north. Not an ordinary dragon. A fire dragon.

"... Your Highness." I kept my eyes fixed on that lengthening chain of fire ahead, my voice dropping without my intending it to.

"Even if you were willing to land outside the city now, things are no longer as simple as they were five minutes ago."

"Why?"

"Because you've already been seen." I raised a hand toward the watchtowers igniting one after another.

"And seen very clearly." She followed my gesture and appeared entirely unbothered.

"So I've been seen."

"For you, being seen is just being seen." I let out a humorless breath.

"For the capital, it translates to: the south hasn't been stabilized, and a fire dragon is already heading for the city." This time, she didn't immediately argue. Because however impatient she was with human politics, signal beacons were not a difficult concept to interpret. They weren't a welcome signal. They weren't notification of a guest's arrival. They were every voice in the region screaming the same thing in the same direction: Something is very wrong. And we were the something.

The landscape below had changed entirely from the Southern Reaches. The scorched, blackened terrain had long since been left behind. In its place spread farmland in broad, orderly patches—neat irrigation channels, villages and relay stations arranged along the post roads in tidy intervals. Viewed from above, everything looked clean, ordered, stable—exactly the kind of image the Empire preferred to describe in official documents. Which was precisely why the weight in my chest was getting heavier.

Because the chaos in the south was visible. Fire, ash, collapsed walls, fleeing people—you didn't need to guess how bad it was. You could see it. The capital was different. The capital was the kind of place that, even with a dragon about to drop out of the sky, would first straighten its ceremonial hat, sweep the front steps, and proceed to assign blame with impeccable dignity to the sound of bells and horns. I could already map out what was probably happening at Cliffhold Fortress right now.

The Imperial Guard being roused from sleep. Outer court officials rushing toward the palace in various states of disarray. The night-duty scribes copying dispatches with shaking hands. And if my sister happened to be in the capital right now— I closed my eyes briefly. She'd probably already verbally eviscerated half the court into wakefulness before anyone else had finished panicking. The thought made me reach instinctively for the communication pendant at my chest—then stop myself.

Not because I didn't want to make contact. Because once those words left my mouth, they couldn't be recalled. And I still hadn't worked out how to phrase I am currently riding a fire dragon princess and attempting to prevent her from flying directly to the capital to apologize to the king in person in a way that resembled a normal status report. This was too difficult. So difficult that I had actually begun to feel nostalgic for the straightforward, uncomplicated rage of Typhon Fortress's battlements.

Ignicia seemed to notice I had gone quiet for too long.

"Cedric."

"Mm?"

"Are you afraid?" I blinked, then found myself almost wanting to laugh.

"Your Highness, that question is profoundly unfair."

"How so?"

"Because since last night, I haven't stopped being afraid of something." I said it plainly.

"The south about to go to war—afraid. Margrave Frank overturning the table—afraid. You grabbing me and flying into the sky—afraid. You announcing you want to fly to the capital to apologize to the king in person—considerably more afraid." She seemed to find this genuinely entertaining. Her tail swept lightly through the airstream.

"And yet you're still alive."

"That's not a compliment. That's simply the current objective reality."

"From where I stand, those are roughly the same thing." I sighed. Wonderful. This dragon had problems not only with her decision-making process, but with her approach to encouragement as well. Not long after that exchange, the cloud layer ahead was cut open by a shaft of morning light. And for the first time, I saw Cliffhold Fortress. It sat where distant cliffs met the mountain range—gray-white iron grown from stone ridges.

The capital's outer walls spread outward in concentric rings following the terrain, towers and bell towers and bridges and outer districts and inner keep layered in the morning light, vast and cold and magnificent. Under normal circumstances, it would be the kind of sight that instilled any Imperial citizen with simultaneous belonging and awe. Right now, I only registered one thing. On several tall towers at the capital's outer perimeter, new fire and smoke had already risen.

Not the ragged, desperate beacons of the Southern Reaches—something more ordered, more hierarchical, and considerably more capable of making one's scalp prickle with dread. One column. Two. Three. These weren't alerting the border to unusual movement. These were telling the capital— Whether it understood the full picture or not— A dragon is coming. The breath I'd been holding finally sank all the way to the bottom of my chest.

At Typhon Fortress, there had at least been Margrave Frank—the kind of border commander whose fury could still be reasoned with, once you found the right leverage. Cliffhold Fortress was different. Once the capital entered full alert, what followed wasn't one marquis's temper. It was the entire Empire's nervous system activating simultaneously. And I was currently sitting on the single thing that nervous system least wanted to see, flying directly toward it.

I pressed my fingers to my temple and finally, with complete sincerity, addressed Ignicia.

"Your Highness."

"Mm?"

"I am formally notifying you."

"Of what?" I looked at the capital ahead—closer now, looking increasingly like the opening sequence of an entirely new category of disaster—and spoke with the solemn gravity of a man making a final confession.

"If you still intend to fly directly in there, I'm going to need to start deciding whether I should write the Empire's letter of apology first, or select my own burial plot first."