For once, they could take comfort in their wariness. If the elders were frightened of the mountain, then they could be too.

Past the northern shore of the lake, there were no levin. Everything they had worked to destroy and to create had been westwards, eastwards, southwards. Anywhere but closer to the mountain. Guff was not convinced by their reasoning. Surely mouse-men were far too meagre to attract attention from the beast they had sought. A pair of yearling skern would only make half a mouthful.

Still, their cowardice had its advantages. The land rolled out from the lake green and free. No spies had perched atop the strewn boulders to call down the fire of dragons upon them. And the dens of less intelligent animals had been left wild and unseen. Food was plentiful there.

It didn’t seem to matter much when you were looking into the ice-blue eyes of the monster before them.

They had found his cave easily by the churned earth of his landing points, and the icicles that hung incongruently from the trickling moss of its roof. Further on, the ground grew frosty and crackly underclaw. The skern felt heat, the vital energy of life drawn from that morning’s sunrise, spilling away uselessly into the rock. They knew they would have to be quick or forever stay in this miserable place.

Guff thought they might be staying here forever anyway.

The dragon was young, as far as dragons go. It had seemed asleep in its dark pool at the centre of the white cavern, but it had been listening to their ponderous approach for hours. When they entered the final chamber, it had reared its pointed head, fixed them with its paralysing eyes, and blew angry jets of snow into the air about them.

It hadn’t spoken, and neither had they.

Venn was growing sleepy in the cold. They must act.

“We come in peace,” he said, in their own tongue, for dragons know all tongues of all the life forms below them.

The dragon was silent for a long time. When Guff was beginning to think it really was asleep, it spoke. “There is no peace.” Its voice was low and whispering, yet he felt the icy blast of its breath freeze his spines all the same.

“It is true. Your brothers have forsaken you,” Venn went on, and Guff jolted and shuddered beside him, for it seemed a terrible thing to say to this colossus that could swallow them without a second thought. Alguan was a reject of his kind, an abhorrence born in the wrong age. The world was cold, a dark and still darkening age for the kings of reptiles who had ruled all in eras past. Where his own generation and dozens before him warmed their lairs with fire, he was fit only to chill.

When Guff dared to look back at Alguan, he knew Venn had struck home. There was a sadness, a loneliness in those eyes, he saw now. “Once, your kind befouled these slopes and the plains before it. And then I fled my homeland, and now they skulk here no longer. Yet here you are. So I say to you, so your brothers have forsaken you also.”

The dragon’s perception was like a knife. It had stricken Guff utterly dumb. But Venn had the bond he had hoped to forge.

“And now also our prey rise up to insult us. They have joined in vile union with your kin. We want to put them in their place.”

The dragon smirked knowingly. “And now you seek to do the same.”

Venn shook off his fear and stepped forward. They were dead anyway, if Alguan chose. “We are skern. We pay homage to nothing. We are the lords of the hunt. And in that hunt, we will use whatever weapons necessary to kill. You could be one of those weapons.”

To Guff, they passed a century in silence.

Finally, Alguan stirred. His mighty head dipped towards the little reptile. “No union, then. But a brief partnership. I have watched my fellows pass into your lands, dabbling in the dealings of the weak. Very well; if you seek to cause them pain, I may not make a meal of you yet. What is it you seek?”

This was the risk. This journey, this last chance to lay waste to their foes, rested upon a murmured word days from their hatching, a bedtime tale drowned in the buzzing of flies deep in the festering marsh of their childhood. “It is said you can turn water to earth.”

When Alguan rocked back, Guff turned and slithered for the cave’s mouth, for surely the beast meant to strike. But the snorts of gently billowing snow were laughter, seasoned by age and matured by dominance. “In a manner,” was all he said, but the pool was crystallising around him, hardening in sheets upon his scales, and Guff’s fear turned to wonder, and then to understanding. “You can get us there!” he roared. “To Jiharu.”

“Yes,” said Alguan, and the skern took no notice of the glimmer in his eye until he spoke again.

“But, of course, at a price.” The cave seemed to darken further. “You will reach this city of the furred ones, and you will die there.” He said it with such grim certainty that Venn’s legs buckled beneath him and he sank to the icy stone. Life dripped away into the hungry cold. “But if I am wrong, if you find a way, you must repay me. You cannot much harm my enemies, and neither can I, without the turn of the Season. They will have taken it with them, to guard the Age of Fire, and they will do all they can to preserve it. But, just like your levin, they are upsetting the balance. The world calls out for a new age, where the workers of ice and frost will sit atop the Horned Mountains and the practitioners of flame shall cower in the hovels where they belong. I am no accident. I am a harbinger. It is time, I will use any weapons I can, and you will be my weapon.” He shifted forward, and the cracking of the ice rent the hollow air about them. “So you would find the Season, which has been coveted and stolen away from the temple, and you shall thwart its guardians, and you shall return it to me. If you do not perish as I have foreseen.”

A moment later, they were out in the open. The sky was grey with cloud, but they relished the weak warmth upon their scales as they would a summer noon. The rustle of dark leaves, the inviting depths of the bountiful woods, the cry of a pinerat, were all near. The blasphemous towers of Jiharu were long ago, far away on the horizon.

“Our way awaits,” said Venn as they lay in the soft flowers by a thin stream. “The ambush is set. Yet if we feast and save the clan that no longer wants us, we are destined to go to war with the kings of the sky itself, take the artifact that they hold most dear, and deliver unto a temporary ally who will bring about a mysterious change to the world as we know it, all for his own gain. To walk this path, we merely go down to the water and stride into the stronghold of a thousand or more hateful enemies with sticks and stones and fire, the same enemies who nearly ended us with a mere two-dozen warriors and a cunning trap in that valley. That way, our demise has been predicted twice. What say you?”

Guff rolled over in his bed of leaves. The sun beat pleasantly upon his soft belly and spear-scarred armour. “I say that if we are to resign ourselves to cussock and fireworm, we may as well go back and let the master take us. Sometimes, I can barely remember our burrow now. But what I do remember is master’s burrow, and the trophies on his walls, and let me say one thing...” He rolled to his feet and inclined his head to his friend. “Those things weren’t cussock or fireworm.” He shoved Venn to his feet with his snout and set off from whence they came.

“We said we were going for a hunt. Now let’s hunt.”