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Twenty-Five

Embar Dea stood on a shelf of ice, looking upward. They were to leave in an hour, when the sun sank down across the western ocean, one of the halfway points of the day when the veils between the worlds were thin. Embar Dea worried about the journey. Her strength had already been sapped by the voyage here, by the cold of the seas and the struggle through the ocean currents, as well as by the burden of the pearl. She did not know whether she could make it as far as Cloud Kingdom, but she had no other choice. She could not stay on Earth, the Dragon Prince had explained to her. The dragons must act as one, now, in the face of the oldest of enemies; it had been decreed.

Embar Dea understood this and there was a kind of peace within that understanding. If she died on the way, plummeting out of the heavens and back into the ocean like a cold comet, then it would be worth it. She was the oldest; she would have to die someday. The souls of dragons do not pass into Heaven or Hell, for they are already travelers between the worlds. Once she died, Embar Dea knew, she would be extinguished, forever gone, but a little soul-fragment would remain, passing into the group soul of dragonkind, and that was enough. But the worry was still there: even dragons have a lingering fear of mortality.

So she waited on the ice, watching alone, until the other dragons emerged, one by one in the greening light, and joined her.

The Dragon Prince Rish was the first to fly. He leaped from the ice shelf, spreading black-silver wings and soaring out across the waves. The falling sunlight caught the water, glittered red, and then the dragon from the south followed him, shooting like a blazing coal into the sunset. One by one, the others left, until only Embar Dea remained on the shelf as the others flew overhead, circling around and around, singing encouragement to her. The sea thundered against the ice shelf, the waves rising to a froth in the growing wind, and the sky was filled with the rattle of scales.

"Embar Dea!" the Dragon Prince called. "Embar Dea!" and then he cried out her name again in the ancient tongue, the tongue that dragons used before the coming of humankind and the coming of the ice, when demons and Celestials alike roamed the plains of the great continent of the changing world, and the dragons held sway over ocean.

When she heard that name, Embar Dea was compelled to respond and the Dragon Prince knew it: he had seen the need to help her. He called out the name again and again, and the other dragons picked it up and sang it back to her, so that the air reverberated with the power of her name and Embar Dea spread her creaking wings and let the power drive under them and lift her upward.

The ice shelf fell away, dwindling beneath her to a tiny patch in the middle of the waves; from this height, the domes of the sea palace looked like a handful of mouse skulls, fragile and frail. Embar Dea spread her wings further and rushed out across the sea, diving until the spray spattered her scales, and then she rose, following the Dragon Prince who was rising now into the darkening sky, as distant as a blown leaf.

She was flying for the first time in years, free in the airs of Earth. It took a great deal of will power to go after the Prince, not to soar off across the waves, leave the twilight world behind. But the Prince sang her ancient name, weaving it into a tapestry of the names of the other dragons, words that could not have been spoken in a human voice, and she rose and followed and flew.

Up and up, until the sea palace was no longer visible and the sea was a great dark curve against the wall of night. Embar Dea saw the last rim of the sun, a rind above the curve, and then it sank and was gone. The stars blazed, mirrored now by the scatter of the lights of Earth, the cities of the world. As they rose, Embar Dea drew closer to the other dragons, flying in tight spirals now, winding themselves up from the Earth and out of its magical field. Embar Dea looked up and saw that the veil that parted the worlds was drawing aside, a glowing shimmer of light across the sky, hiding the stars.

Up and up and the veil was all around them, hiding the world from view and Embar Dea felt the wrench and tug as the magic of the human realms vanished and they were through into the upper levels. Heaven lay ahead, a line of bright shore, but before that were towers of cumulus, huge sweeps of cirrus cloud against a burning blue sky, anvil thunderheads around which the lightning of flame dragons played in bursts and lashes of light.

Cloud Kingdom. Memories thousands of years old came rushing back: riding the winds of Heaven, dancing on the shores of the sky. Her mother, the Mother of Dragons, a vast, sinuous shape against the cloudscape, rarely glimpsed and always a sign of great change. There was a new Mother of Dragons now, drawn from the heart of Cloud Kingdom long after Embar Dea and her siblings had come to Earth. Embar Dea did not know her; it seemed strange, to have a Mother that was younger than herself. But she did not care about that. She was thankful to have reached the end of her journey, to have made it alive. With the others, she glided through the sparkling air between the clouds. Other dragons were coming to meet them, coiling and curling through the air, and Prince Rish flew to meet them like a black arrow. Embar Dea followed, going home.

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Framed