"Does she do that often?" The dragon spoke the words as she watched Lina kneel beside her sister and touch her cheek. She had had a firm hold of her sister's hand, but had only managed to slow her fall and keep her from hitting her head on the hard floor. Lina stared at the creature before her, as she clung to Quara's arm and said the first thing that popped into her head.

"You speak but you don't speak. Your lips don't move."

"You're very observant, small one. Well, for the most part that is. I don't actually have lips. Or a tongue that could form the words of your language. I speak directly into your mind."

"And can you hear my thoughts?" Lina thought the words, but did not say them aloud. She stared at the dragon as she waited for a response. In the dim light, at the edge of the circle cast by the egg, she could see Ausfela, but couldn't really get a good look at her. She looked to be a dim chocolate color in the murky half shade.

"Only when you think at me. That is to say, only when you mean for me to hear what you're thinking. I can't just pick and choose among your thoughts and have a look. Most of the time anyways. Some people think loudly all the time, but as a rule most do not." The dragon bobbed her head ever so slightly as she responded.

Silence fell between them as Quara's eye lids began to flutter. After a moment her bright blue eyes opened entirely and she looked around, recognition flickering across her features as she realized that their adventure hadn't all been part of some nightmare and that she wasn't waking up, safe in her own bed.

"Can you hear me?" The dragon asked simply.

"Of course. I didn't lose my hearing when I fell." Quara rubbed her lower back, apparently emboldened by the fact that they hadn't yet been eaten by the large dragon who sat at the edge of the light circle watching them with jewel green eyes.

"She speaks into our minds." Lina said the words aloud, addressing them to her sister.

"I hadn't even noticed." Quara glanced at her sister and then her gaze returned to Ausfela. "But of course I can hear her. I answered her before I... fell." The older girl was reluctant to admit that she had fainted.

"You are small for a dragon, aren't you?" Lina let go of Quara's hand but stayed by her side as she addressed the question to the dragon. "I mean, I always imagined dragons like the ones in the books that were read to us at school. Dragons as large as mountains, they always said. Dragons that slept for a thousand years and snow fell on them and dirt blew over them and trees and brush even grew on them and people, in time, forgot that the mountain had ever not been there and built houses on them, only to find one day, after ten generations had lived there, that the dragon had awoken and was rising up into the sky." Lina regarded the dragon with her eyebrows raised because obviously such a thing could never happen to the small dragon who was flicking her tail back and forth, reminding Quara of an annoyed cat.

"No, such a thing could never happen to a Starseeker. It's not surprising that your people remember the stories of the Ancients. While they were never great in number their size made them unforgettable to the people in these virtually dragon-less lands. I am a smaller dragon, both because I am relatively young and because the dragons that I have descended from do not grow to a great size, even when we are adults. Although that isn't to say that we're very small. We aren't. Someday perhaps you will visit the far North Eastern shores of Za'Reek, where you can see truly small dragons."

"Those little things, well it's hard for me to even think of them as dragons, they can be such nuisances at times, but they are about as long as your arm when they're fullly grown. Their brains are tiny. They don't speak. To be entirely honest, I wish we could call them birds, because I think that they have more in common with birds than real dragons, but since they have scales and look like us, no one else will agree."

"Humans usually find them charming and ooh and ahh and give them scraps of meat so that they come and sit on your shoulder and nuzzle your cheek." Quara laughed to herself because Ausfela made a movement as she ended her little speech that looked quite a bit like a shrug.

"How big do Starseekers get? And how old are you? You said that you're young, so are your parents down here with you?" Quara rattled off the list of questions and Ausfela tilted her head to one side and sighed loudly.

"Young is a relative term child. If I were your age, as a dragon, I would not even be a hatchling yet. I would still be snug inside my egg, not even thinking of making my way out into the world. When I was first hatched I was about the size of a dog. In the past four thousand years I have grown to this size, which if I were stretched all the way out, would make me about ten lengths long, from the tip of my nose to the end of my tail. When I'm fully grown I will be at least twice this size."

"By the time that I was hatched here, my parents were gone. You see I was laid in a time of great unrest. My people were driven from these caves. They had no time to save me or to come back for me since they had no reason to believe that I survived. But I did. Somehow I was spared. And then later, when I was newly hatched, I was saved by a girl not unlike the two of you."

"From what I've learned since, back in the years when I could still come and go as I pleased, I believe my parents fled the planet and went home. It would have been unusual for such a young pair to go, but it was an unusual time. On our home planet there is no other species that rivals us. Usually the Starseeker tradition tells us that we are born and raise our children here and that we retire to our home beyond the Sun when we are old and tired, for we find that the fruit that grows in that land replenishes us and keeps us young. And someday I hope that I will meet them there and find that they survived the turmoil that forced them from our home." Ausfela ended with another sigh and then swung her head from side to side. Both girls were silent as they digested the massive amount of information that they had just learned.

"If you trust me with it, can I take that fragment that you hold in your hand up to the Light Spark in the cavern overhang, right over there?" Her eyes peered upward into the darkness. "I haven't seen one of those since shortly after the City was abandoned and this place grew dark. I'm not powerful enough yet to make one on my own. So other than the occasional burst of fire here and there, which couldn't set a single thing aflame down here since everything is made of stone, I've been in the dark. And while I can see fairly well, as you can imagine, it isn't the same."

"She's talking about the Egg." Quara whispered the words and Lina glanced down at the light which was still tightly grasped in her hand.

"If you give it to me I can set this whole place alight. It runs on Fire Stone Incandescence, or so I learned from the human boy who used to come here with that very stone you hold in your hand. He read it in a book somewhere."

"Give you the light?" Lina said each word slowly, obviously unsure of trusting their new friend just yet.

"If you'd rather do it, you can. I'll fly you up there. That's what the boy and I used to do. I do wish he'd left the light, like I asked him to, but he needed it more than I did. Or so he said." If it was possible for a dragon to look wistful, Ausfela managed it.

"Fly?" Quara squeaked the word, and turned to grab her sister's arm, but Lina was already striding towards the dragon.

"You stay right there Quara. I'm going to set this place alight. And ride a dragon."

Quara swayed slightly where she sat and leaned forward to press her forehead against her knees, thankful that she was already sitting down and wouldn't have far to fall if she swooned again.

As Lina drew closer to Ausfela, the light cast by the Egg fell more brightly across the dragon's scales. "You're the color of brightly burnished gold!" the girl gasped, her voice filled with laughter at the beautiful sight before her. "Quara look at her. You need to look! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?" Quara, looking rather pale, shook her head and looked back down again.

The flaxen dragon had a long, slender neck and enormous powerful golden wings. The intense shade of her eyes reminded Lina of the color of the bright blue green chest of a peacock she'd seen in a picture book once and her long tapered nose hooked upwards at the end. With her mouth closed, as it was at that moment, Lina couldn't see a single one of the many teeth that she knew were hidden inside Ausfela's massive mouth, but she could still see the incredibly sharp claws that clicked on the crystalline floor every time the dragon moved.

"Why thank you child. Now, I don't suppose that you've ever ridden a dragon before. It isn't at all like riding a horse, what with the kicking and the jerking on the reins and telling it where to go, although I suppose that if you're from the Caverns, you haven't ever ridden one of those either, have you? Well then. You're going to step up on the back of my arm, just above what you would call my elbow, and slide your foot across in front of my wings, being very careful not to damage them. I'd rather you not touch them at all with your boot if you can help it. They're strong and tough, but I'd really they rather not be kicked."

Lina stepped towards the dragon and followed her instructions. Reaching up with her hands as she put her foot on the back of the dragon's arm she was able to just barely reach one of the golden ridges that ran up the center of the dragons back. They looked rather sharp, but she found that they were not so sharp that they could cut her hand, although from her vantage point below she was uncertain of exactly how she would sit with ridges running from the top of Ausfela's neck to the tip of her tail. "You said I should sit above your wings, but how do I do that with those ridges?" Lina asked as she paused momentarily in her climb and waited for a response. The ridges looked as though they would be a most uncomfortable seat.

"Climb up and you'll see that there's a spot, just behind the spot where my wings meet my body, where the ridges have been clipped to make room for a seat. That's how you can tell a dragon with a rider, from a dragon without one."

Two questions warred in Lina's mind for a moment and as Ausfela boosted her upwards with her arm and swung herself into the space that the dragon had described, she gave voice to one of them. "Did it hurt?"

"Not at all. I can't feel my scales or those ridges. They're armor. I can only feel what gets past them and the ridge, while smaller, isn't cut all the way off, it's only brought down until it's flush with the other scales."

"And you have a rider?"

"Had. Long ago." There was a pause and Lina clung tightly to the dragon's back as Ausfela shifted her weight from foot to foot.

"What exactly am I supposed to hold onto?"

"Well, that is a bit of a problem. Usually there's a harness that's part of the saddle. But we won't have any luck finding that until the lights are on. So do your best to hold onto that ridge and keep your balance and I'll make sure that you don't fall. And if you do I promise to catch you before you hit the ground. I've never lost a rider yet."

"Be careful Lina!" Quara had risen and followed Lina halfway across the expanse to the dragon, although Lina was fairly certain that her sister was really following the Egg for its light.

"I always am. Especially when it doesn't look like it!" Lina smiled down at her sister and held tightly to the dragon's golden back with both hands. "Let's light this place up."

Ausfela launched herself upwards, into the darkness. Her massive wings expanded and within moments Quara was lost to the darkness below as the circle of light followed them up and up and up until they came to a wide ledge and landed lightly on it. "Place the egg there, on the pedestal inside that bowl." Ausfela was staring at an ornate table, with legs that spiraled up out of the crystal floor of the ledge, and Lina followed her gaze. On top of the crystal table was a red bowl, with a small pedestal that looked as though it had been made to cradle the Egg. Lina slid carefully down the dragon's side, scrapping her cheek on a scale, before landing lightly on the ground.

Thinking of Quara down below in the darkness she strode quickly to the pedestal and placed the Egg on it, then turned to face Ausfela as the entire cavern immediately filled with a bright, ethereal light. The crystals, which made up the whole of the enormous cavern from its floor to its walls, and Lina guessed its ceiling too, although the ceiling was so far above that she couldn't quite glimpse it, were everywhere and they glowed softly, somehow powered by the small golden Egg that Lina had clutched in her hand as they began their descent deeper into the earth.

Together Lina and Ausfela soared slowly in lazy loops down to the ground to land beside Quara. She seemed hardly to notice the dragon now as she turned around in a slow circle, taking in the enormous room. "It makes the City look absolutely unremarkable." She whispered, to no one in particular. "And the Caverns were clearly some utterly unimportant storage area, for all that they believe that they're one of the last bastions of civilization." She shook her head in disbelief.

Lina slide off of Ausfela's back and went to stand behind her sister. The dragon sat a distance away and then turned her attention to the cavern around her, obviously appreciating the opportunity to see it alight after so many years of darkness.

The room was enormous, far larger even than the Heart in the Caverns they'd grown up in, although not quite as large as the cavern which enclosed the main level of the City itself. The spiral staircase ascended, up and up, as far as the eye could see. It was made of crystal, beginning somewhere out of sight for Lina was certain that the staircase had been made of granite when they began walking down it, and the colors of the crystal fluctuated and pulsed as the lights danced across its surface. The floor was wide and open with columns on either side. Each column was carved with an intricate design, with the column that they had stumbled upon in the dark being one of the simplest. Some were carved to look like dragons holding up the roof and others like castles or mountains. One even showed an underwater scene. In a way they reminded Quara faintly of the stained glass windows of the library.

"This is the control room for the palace. There are balconies up above at regular intervals, like the one that I just took you up to, that control different sections of the castle's infrastructure. Long ago this room would have been bustling with dragons and occasionally, during the decades and centuries when we were allies, humans too. But now that I'm the only one left here I've managed mostly on my own to keep things up and running. After all, I had to live here, by myself for thousands of years while I waited for you two to arrive."

"What do you mean when you say that you were waiting for us? How could you know we'd ever arrive? I mean the chances were so incredibly small that anyone would ever find this place, even in a hundred thousand years. But you act like you've expected us all along." Quara said the words quickly and then regarded the dragon with a renewed suspicion as though she had decided that Ausfela was not entirely what she seemed.

"I have expected you. And you were always going to come down here. It was inevitable. The vast majority of moments in our lives are choices that take us one way or another, but whatever other choices you made, they were always meant to lead you here, because we were always meant to meet." The dragon peered at Quara with her cool green eyes and after a moment Quara looked away.

"Out of all of the rather outlandish things that have happened to us in the last twenty-eight hours, that, to me, is the hardest to believe." Quara glanced at Lina as though she expected her to agree, only to find her sister staring at the dragon, her blue eyes wide, "Right, Lina?"

Lina stood for a moment longer in silence, her eyes locked on the dragon and then slowly she began to speak, as though she were picking up pieces of a puzzle one by one and examining them before placing them carefully into their appointed place.

"Quara, do you remember when I was tiny and I tied that rope around my waist and tried to lower myself down into that pit?" For a moment Lina's voice sounded very young and Quara turned to face her sister entirely, giving the younger girl her complete attention.

"Of course I do. It's not a moment that any member of our family is very likely to forget." Quara shook her head ever so slightly at the question, for the answer to it was quite obvious in her mind. "I thought that you'd fallen. I was sure that I was never going to see you again."

"Do you remember what I said that day? Why I went down there? What it was that I was looking for?"

"Not really. Not right now anyways, with a thousand thoughts zipping around in my head, clamoring for attention. I always thought that the point was quite simply to get into trouble in every possible way. What other excuse could there be?"

"I'm not looking for excuses Quara. And I think when I tell you, you'll remember and be surprised that you didn't see it earlier. I'm surprised that I didn't realize it the moment that we saw Ausfela. But I didn't, probably because I was too surprised at seeing a dragon standing in front of me."

"So what was the reason, Lina?" Quara's voice was impatient as the exhaustion and stress of the day began to get the better of her

"That she'd been dreaming that there was a golden dragon waiting for her deep down in the earth and that if she went down there she would find me." Ausfela's voice filled the silence that had fallen a few moments before, and both girls turned to face her. "For this meeting was always supposed to happen. Every single moment for three thousand years have led up to it. And now we're here, standing around talking, as if the world wasn't about to come crashing down about our shoulders any moment. Although I guess it's hung in there for these past few millennia so a few more hours isn't likely to hurt anyone. Except of course for those unlucky few who don't survive them. After all, the longer the battle goes on the more casualties they add to the lists. Still it's not good trying to go around saving the world on an empty stomach. Let's get you two something to eat."