...

"No way!" Kayda said in disbelief, startling Scylla who was on top of her head.

"I also wish it wasn't true." Blaze groaned and slumped onto the chair.

Lyla, Matthew and I were just looking at our mates in confusion.

"You mind explaining why a single letter has you all groaning like your least favorite aunt said she's visiting?" Lyla asked.

The four of them just looked at us for a second and sighed for the ninth time.

"I'm not taking Lyla there." Blaze immediately said.

"I wish I could take Mat with me so it'd be less painful to be there, but you know how Scylla gets when neither of us are close by. And we can't take a baby dragon there." Kayda grumbled in exhaustion.

"Wish we could leave Katie behind too." Draco said with a sigh.

"But we can't because she's technically our horde's queen, so she has to attend." Tharion added in the same tone, making my eyebrow twitch.

That's it.

I slammed my hand on the table, successfully gaining their attention.

"Now that you're carefully listening, explain. What's going on?" I said in annoyance because their constant sighing and not explaining was getting on my nerves.

"Oh right. They don't know about this." Kayda said with a chuckle earning a glare from me.

"It's an invitation." Blaze said and glared at the piece of paper as if it murdered his mother.

"A wedding invitation?!" Lyla said excitedly.

"What?! No! Thankfully it's not. I don't think I'd be able to survive one of their weddings." Draco immediately protested.

"Just get to the point already." I grumbled in annoyance.

"It's an invitation from a different horde." Tharion started. "Every year, this same horde sends an invitation to all hordes we currently know of, and invites us to a type of a gathering at their territory." He explained.

"It's more really so they can flaunt how richer they've become in the past year. Each gathering gets worse and worse as the years pass." Draco added with a grumble.

"But why?" I said in confusion.

"When we first started with these gatherings, it was for a good reason actually." Blaze said.

"Yeah. At the time there were a lot of wars between dragons and humans all over the world, so we'd meet multiple times a year to exchange our findings and new battle strategies." Tharion explained.

"But as the years passed, there were less and less wars, and eventually humans forgot we even existed." Draco added.

"So now we meet only once a year just to catch up with each other and see if there's anything new going on." Blaze said as he twirled the invitation between his fingers.

"But for the last twenty years, this horde insisted we gather at their castle because it's 'more convenient'." Draco said in annoyance making quotation marks with his fingers.

"I've been attending for the last four years and I can tell you they're the most stuck up dragons I've ever meet. A real living nightmare." Kayda said, sending a glare to the poor invitation.

"Luckily, their son, who's also the next king, is the complete opposite of them." Blaze said with a relieved sigh.

"We honestly can't wait for him to become the king." Draco added in the same tone.

"But unfortunately, that won't be happening any time soon." Tharion said in dissatisfaction.

"Jeez. They sound like total pieces of shit." Lyla said and scrunched up her face in disgust.

"Even worse." Kayda added with a sigh.

"And you have to attend?" I asked earning a nod from all of them.

"All members of the royal families have to go." Blaze added.

"All?!" I said in disbelief.

"Unfortunately. So don't be surprised if you see ten or more dragons coming from a single horde." Tharion said with a small smile. "Former kings and queens are the only members of the royal families who don't have to attend." He quickly added.

Lucky...

"But we won't be taking Lyla and Matthew with us." Draco said making the said two cheer in delight and making me groan.

"Lyla is a pregnant human. It's not really safe for her to be among so many dragons." Blaze explained.

"And as Kayda said earlier, Mat has to stay because of Scylla. I know she'd rather stay too, but she's the only princess of our horde, so she doesn't really have a choice." Draco added with a smirk that said 'if we're going to suffer, so are you' as he looked at a glaring Kayda.

"And you have to come with us because you became this horde's queen the moment we mated." Tharion said as he played with my hair.

"If only we mated a little later. I really don't want to take you with us." Draco whined.

"Because I'm a human?" I asked.

"That too. But mostly because we're one of the few kings and queens who were mateless for a very long time." Tharion explained.

"By taking you there, we'll be like moving targets. Almost everyone will want to meet you and we really don't want to expose you that much." Draco added with a grumble.

Oh...

"I guess we should start preparing if we want to get there on time." Blaze said with a sigh, making the rest of his siblings sigh too.

You can tell how much they're hating this by just hearing all of this sighing.

"When are we supposed to leave?" I asked as I unconsciously started to play with the strings of Draco's pants.

"In two days. We'll be traveling through the portal, but it'll still take some time because that horde is quite far away." Tharion answered.

Great...

...

To whomever's been sharing my book with other people, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I just got a bunch of notifications from people adding the book to their reading lists and I'm literally in tears (ಥ⌣ಥ)

I know it could be just people randomly finding my book, but either way I'm way beyond grateful for this. It finally feels like I made some progress and I'm so freaking happy! And maybe a tiny bitty emotional lol

Anyways, t