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Lithian gave a half-smile. “We’ll either find them, Casseth…or we’ll leave knowing we looked, and tried everything we could. You can’t expect more from yourself than that…” After a moment’s debate, he reached out, laying a hand gently on Cas’ shoulder. “But if you want to know, I do think we’ll find them. How hard could it be? Your father lived here for a good portion of his life, and the rest of his family has likely been here for all of theirs. You cannot reside in a place that long and have no one know your name. Someone will point us in the right direction. I’m sure of it.”

The chat between them was sparse, but not strained, both of them simply too tired to push the conversation far. They ate a quick meal of stored traveling food from their luggage, and soon after settled down to sleep. Casseth, talented as he was at the art of sleeping — under, apparently, almost any conditions — passed out near immediately. Lithian, on the other hand, unused to trying to sleep under ‘less than optimal’ conditions, tossed and turned, shivered and fidgeted. He had lost track of how much time had passed when he finally started to drift off.

Then, of course, he heard something.

Lithian frowned, but held himself still, listening more carefully as his dosing brain roused itself. Harmless? Or sinister. After a long stretch of silence, Lithian began to think that perhaps he’d been imagining things. A rustle of wind or a small woodland critter could easily have caused such a disturbance. Unfortunately, by the time he came to this conclusion, he was wide awake again. And frigid.

Huffing out a frustrated sigh, he pushed himself upright, pulled what little he had masquerading as bedding around his shoulders in shawl format, and stood. The fire had long since died out, nothing but a few, glinting orange embers peeking through the charred remains of it, but before Lithian could reach for more kindling, however, a much louder crack sounded in the nearby woods, and he froze.

After a long moment of holding his breath, Lithian let his bedding slip quietly off of his shoulders and stood, eyes on the dark wood and river at his back. He hated how vulnerable the dark left him, and momentarily envied his friend’s night vision. But, he consoled himself, at least this time he had a body of water to work with. Whether or not to wake Casseth itched at him — was it real danger? Or a false alarm? What if it was and he woke Cas too late? Or—

A shattering roar, coupled by a pulse of dark, writhing purple-black magic broke through the trees, and Lithian staggered back, sweeping two palms sidelong and drawing up a full shield from the river just in time. The dragon, however, had brought company, and even as Lithian shouted for Casseth, he felt his pulse hop as his eyes darted from one black shadowy shape to the next. It looked like a flock of them, cut out against the distant dark sky.

One, two, three, four…

Lithian drew the river out and around him like an undulating bubble shield, then more until he had the equivalent of fighting gloves pooled around his hands, ready to throw.

Five, six, seven, eight…

He swept sidelong when the first dragon attacked and twisted himself around, slinging bolts of water at the beast like head-sized pellets and then drawing up a battering ram from the river itself. By the time he got the first down, he had two more on either side of him.

Nine, ten, eleven…

Twelve.

“Minus one,” Lithian murmured to himself, dipped, and pivoted, drawing up river water and manipulating it like two massive hands to wrap around the beasts and yank them into the current and down until their struggling wings stilled and disintegrated. “Minus three…”

In the moment that the dragon’s jaw clamped down on Casseth’s arm, Lithian felt his pulse drop, and for an instant, the whole of the world seemed to stand still. Then, when the earth around his friend’s arm spiked up, piercing, and turning the dragon to nothing, Lithian’s breath rushed from him. His first instinct was to run forward. To make sure Casseth was alright, but there were too many dragons, and he knew neither of them could afford it yet. So instead, together they fought, and though it felt like it lasted half the night, the dragons’ numbers slowly dwindled and at long last, petered to nothing but the glowing remains of their scattered souls.

In the aftermath, Lithian checked over Casseth’s arm, applying a small pulse of magic to help tone down the inevitable bruising, but fortunately — miraculously, even — nothing was broken, and Casseth, of course, insisted he was fine the whole while. If nothing else, after the souls had been gathered and they collapsed back down to their bedding, Lithian found sleep much easier to come by. Absolute exhaustion had a way of making almost any surface feel infinitely more comfortable.

In the morning, almost as though the fates were apologizing for their poor string of luck with the dragons, Lithian woke to one of their missing hastars chewing at the edges of his hair, the other busily trying to sniff out what was left of their food supplies. Apparently, the tamed beasts had not fared so well trying to feed themselves and came back to the one reliable source they knew of: Magescian company.

After tethering the beasts back up, rescuing what little remained of their food, and prepping again for travel, the pair set off once more. Fortunately, the road was not as hard to find in the day as it might have been, and before noon, they were arriving at the yawning gates of none other than Obsidian City.