Kestrel and Dune. Our dead guardians.
If only she’d had more time to ask Dune about where her egg came from. He’d always been evasive when the subject came up, but if she’d known her friends were planning an escape — if they’d trusted me enough to tell me about it, she thought with a frown — she could have pressed him harder.
Sunny swiveled her head around, listening.
There was an odd noise in this forest.
Actually there were several odd noises. Like thumps and murmurs and a chattery kind of birdsong, almost as though squirrels were trying to imitate their winged neighbors.
But — it sounded as though it was coming from under the ground.
She crouched and pressed one ear to the warm earth.
There’s definitely something under here. Groundhogs? Rabbits? She didn’t think any normal rodents made noises quite like this. And from what she could tell, it wasn’t a small warren underneath her — the sounds seemed to be coming from fairly far away as well.
Softly she paced through the forest, stopping occasionally to listen. She kept an eye out for the three NightWings, but they weren’t hard to avoid. First there was the roaring and crashing around, and then after a while, snoring that shook the top branches of the trees.
Sunny worked her way cautiously westward, in the direction of the desert. Small brown and red birds chorused from the trees, occasionally pausing as they saw her approach, and then starting again after a moment, as if they realized she was nothing to worry about. Bumblebees and dragonflies buzzed and hummed and flitted around her talons. In the mild morning breeze, Sunny could smell apples and mint leaves. And something else, too, like old burnt wood.
She couldn’t hear the sounds from under the ground anymore, but the burnt smell drew her on. Up ahead she could see a break in the trees.
She stepped out into the bright sunlight and stopped, her eyes momentarily full of light.
There was a hole blasted in the forest.
Something had been here once — something that stretched for more than a mile within the forest, bigger than the dragonets’ home under the mountain — but it was gone now, all burned to black ashes.
Where Sunny stood, at the edge of it, the forest was trying to rise again. Ashes drifted like dead leaves over her claws, but she could see small green shoots wriggling through here and there.
She spread her wings and took to the air, hoping for a better look. The burnt area stretched in jagged slashes through the trees and ended at the border with the rocky foothills that led to the desert. From above, she could see that the hole in the forest was many wingspans across and black as a NightWing’s scales. It looked like a dark gap in a piece of jewelry where a gemstone had been violently gouged out.
She circled overhead. Everything inside the hole looked twisted and blasted into dark ashes, but as Sunny studied the wreckage, she realized that it wasn’t just trees that had been burned here.
Some of the ghostly shapes that remained looked like … buildings.
But these buildings were too small for dragons.
Sunny landed next to one of the ruins and stared at it in confusion for a moment. Even she was too big to fit through the stone doorways that leaned silently out of the ashes.
But why would any dragon build houses so small?
She walked around it, her wings stirring up small tornadoes of ash flakes, and saw that in the center of the burnt area was a kind of open square. She could feel hard, cracked stones meeting her claws under the layers of ash. In the middle of the square she found a collapsed pile of round rocks, and tipped sideways among those was a blackened metal bell about the size of Sunny’s head.
Somebody definitely built this. Were they keeping some kind of small animal here?
She turned to look at another of the small stone doorways and found a shape sticking out of the wreckage beside it. When she clawed it out, she realized it was a piece of stone, roughly carved into a shape with two legs, no wings, and holding something pointy over its head.
Oh! Sunny inhaled sharply, getting a noseful of old soot smell. Scavengers! The statue, if that’s what it was, looked a bit like a drawing from one of the old scrolls about scavengers who attacked dragons for their treasure, waving sharp little toothpick claw things called swords.
Did scavengers build this place? Can they do things like make bells and carve statues?
Sunny knew scavengers lived in dens, but she hadn’t thought they could build real buildings like this. She always imagined them clustering in caves or digging out holes to live in, or maybe leaning long sticks together to create shelters, at most. Here there was clearly advanced masonry, deliberate foundation work, and a sort of organized street plan, as far as Sunny could tell.
Plus the statue … it was crude, but wasn’t it art? What kind of prey made art?