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Chapter 34: Into Platinum Depths

The threshold swallowed them, and the mountain closed around their sound. Warm breath rose from the stone, carrying the scent of minerals and the faint sweetness of decay, like rain long imprisoned and only now remembering the sky. Nelneras lifted his head, murmured the draconic syllables that bent light into being, and four small orbs flared into existence. They drifted outward, circling the group in a loose constellation, their glow soft as candlelight beneath water.

The gold had no need of them; he could see the shape of every wall by the pulse of heat through the rock. But Axton’s human eyes could not. So, the spell burned for him. Nelneras watched the mage’s face brighten in that gentle radiance, the reflection of it alive in his eyes. The light turned the cavern from a void into a chamber of quiet wonder, where quartz veins winked like frozen stars.

Behind him, Roran gave a low whistle. “You really can’t see a thing without those, huh?” he teased, tail swaying. “Poor Ax, blind as a wyrmling hatched at midnight.”

Nelneras’ whiskers twitched with restrained amusement. “Careful,” he murmured, tone smooth as molten gold cooling to a blade’s edge. “If your voice gets any louder, the whole mountain will think you’re challenging it to wrestle.”

Roran barked a laugh, utterly unoffended. “Wouldn’t mind! Might finally meet something down here that can keep up!”

The sound of it thundered through the cavern until even Zezraya’s copper hide rippled with annoyance. “Hells’ breath, pup,” she muttered without looking back. “Your echo’s got claws. Keep it muzzled before the rocks start answering.”

They walked on, the orbs floating above them like watchful eyes. Broken tools lay half-buried in the dust, rusted picks, cracked helmets, rope stiffened by age. The scent of old labor lingered in the air, the ghosts of dwarves and kobolds who had once sung to the rhythm of stone. Nelneras’ gaze traced the marks of their work, the careful lines of craft turned to ruin, and he felt that familiar ache beneath his ribs: beauty squandered, purpose stolen by fear.

The path narrowed. The ceiling sank low, forcing him to lower his head. He had to fold his wings tight, scales brushing stone. Copper dragons were born for such places; the earth was their cradle. But for him, who loved the sky, every footstep felt like a small betrayal of instinct. Still, he pressed forward. Change did not bloom beneath sunlight alone; it also needed the dark to grow.

A flake of stone clinked from the roof and bounced off Nelneras’ horn. Roran tilted his muzzle up. “Mountain’s flirting with you already.”

Zezraya’s low laugh rolled ahead of her. “Flirting? It’s trying to crush him. Can’t blame it, too much shine in one place makes anything jealous.”

Nelneras huffed, brushing the dust from his snout. “At least I polish my scales with effort, not attitude.”

“Effort?” she said, tail flicking. “I call it vanity with better posture.”

Axton smiled faintly. “That’s… actually impressive wordplay.”

She shot him a glance over her shoulder. “Careful, twig. Compliments sound like sucking up when they come from prey.”

Roran chuckled, stepping between them. “Don’t mind her, Ax. Some folks just growl their way through friendship.”

Zezraya’s mouth curved, half-smirk, half-challenge. “And some folks mistake noise for courage.”

The tunnel widened, the air changing from the stale bite of stone to something faintly sweet, old incense, maybe, or the memory of it. Tool marks on the walls grew neater, deliberate, until even Zezraya slowed her stride. Then Nelneras stopped dead, wings flaring without thinking. One copper-scaled snout took the full sweep of a golden pinion.

“What the hell!” Zezraya snapped, rubbing at her face. “Warn a ness before you try to take her head off!”

The gold didn’t answer. His gaze was locked to the wall, pupils narrowing to molten slits. “There,” he murmured, his voice reverent and taut with discovery. “Look closer.”

Axton raised his hand, coaxing the dancing lights nearer. The glow spread, and from beneath centuries of soot, a faint symbol began to breathe back into being, a rune, circular and intricate, etched with impossible precision. “That’s draconic,” he whispered. “Pre-Ascension, maybe older.”

“Older,” Nelneras said, the words spilling like prayer. “The mark of the Platinum Choir. The dragons who swore to lift mortal souls to the heavens. No one’s seen this in ages.” His whiskers trembled with the thrill of it.

Scrolls rasped open; quill met parchment. Their voices tangled in quick, feverish bursts.

“Notice the secondary lines, like the glyphs from the southern archives!”

“Yes! And this curve, it’s a stylized representation of the First Light, isn’t it?”

“Precisely! The ratio here, look, see how the spiral tightens? It mirrors the hymnal structure, oh, brilliant!”

A groan cut through the scholarly fervor. “By the molten veins,” Zezraya muttered, “they’re gettin’ hard over a wall scratch.”

Axton froze mid-note, flushing scarlet. Nelneras only smiled, tail flicking once in unbothered rhythm. “Some of us,” he said, voice purring with mock elegance, “find intellect arousing.”

“I get it,” Roran said matter-of-factly, dropping into a set of squats. “Happens to me all the time.”

Zezraya cocked her head, grinning. “You get hard over ancient ruins?”

“What? No! I meant—” He stopped mid-rep, ears flattening. “I meant spacing out when Axton starts getting all… mage-like.”

She barked a laugh. “Hells, that’s almost worse.”

“I do like old temples, though,” Roran went on cheerfully, tail swishing. “For the loot and stuff. Don’t you? I mean, this one’s supposed to be your dragoness, right?”

“Hmph. She hasn’t done much for me lately,” Zezraya said, tail snapping once behind her. “But if she left a nice pile of gold down here, I’ll forgive her.”

“There’s the spirit!”

Her eyes narrowed. “You two finished kissing that wall yet, or should I start rationing supplies before your courtship’s over?”

Roran blinked. “You think they’ll take that long? Gods, I didn’t know that was the standard, I’d have packed more food.”

Zezraya turned to him slowly, disbelief flattening her tone. “Are you real?”

“I think so!” He leaned in with a grin. “Here, take a sniff if you don’t believe me.”

Nelneras exhaled through his nostrils, an amused rumble that echoed off the stone. “As fascinating as this exchange is,” he said, rolling up the scroll with careful precision, “Axton and I have determined the passage continues that way.” His wingtip gestured down a branching tunnel.

“Oh, wonderful.” Zezraya muttered.

“It is!” Axton said brightly. “Your boss is going to be thrilled! Whatever’s in there could be priceless!”

“Yes,” Nelneras replied dryly, “because monetary gain is the purest form of worship.”

Axton froze, color rushing to his face. “I—I didn’t mean…well—”

Nelneras’ sigh was warm, indulgent. “It’s all right. Better we find it and learn than leave it buried for coin-counters to plunder.” With that, he started forward, wings brushing the stone, the glow of his lights chasing his golden outline deeper into the earth.

The descent stretched on in wordless procession. Stone gave way to veins of quartz that caught the conjured light and scattered it like distant stars, each step carrying them further from morning. Hours passed, or perhaps only moments, it was impossible to tell. The air grew warmer, wetter, and alive with the pulse of the deep.

The tunnel opened at last into a chamber vast enough to breathe, where the air turned heavy and sweet, steeped in the rot of roots and the ghost of incense long extinguished. Algae glowed along the walls in slow, pulsing veins of green, their light trembling across slick stone and the slow drip of water from unseen heights. Every surface seemed alive, sweating, remembering, and in the stillness between their steps, small creatures scurried through the cracks like thoughts too timid to be spoken.

Roran’s hand was the first to steady Axton’s descent from a step meant for a dragon.

“Anything out there?” he asked, his voice softened by the echo. He reached back to catch Axton’s wrist as the younger man slipped from the last ledge. “Careful—don’t—”

A sharp hiss of breath from the sudden pull on his. “Ow.”

Without a word, Roran took Axton’s hand again. His palm shone faintly, warmth gathering there like morning beneath snow. The wound closed, leaving only a trace of tenderness where the light had passed.

“There,” he murmured, smiling. “Magic hands, remember? Even the gods envy ’em.”

Axton laughed under his breath, quiet and grateful. “You always find a way to prove that.”

Behind them, Zezraya’s claws clicked against the stone, impatient, deliberate.

“If the two of you are done performing miracles,” she said, her voice sharp as struck copper, “some of us would like to finish this century upright.”

“This would go faster if you helped.” Roran called back, still holding Axton’s arm until his footing steadied.

“Don’t look at me, extra muscle,” she replied, tail sweeping past them like a drawn blade. “I told you not to come. If you want comfort, ask your golden caretaker.”

Nelneras had gone still ahead of them. His wings were half-spread, the tips brushing the stone as though listening through it. The faint algae-light caught the gold in his scales and turned it pale and sacred.

“Quiet,” he said softly. “There—by the far wall.”

Shapes moved at the edge of the light. Small. Armored. The gleam of crude blades and yellow eyes.

“Goblins,” Zezraya said with a low hum of amusement. “Seven, maybe eight. I was starting to hope this trip would bore me.”

“We are not here for them,” Nelneras answered. His tone was calm, but the weight in it could have stilled the air. “There is something older beneath this place. You can feel it in the stone.”

“Reluctance to kill, I hear?” Her grin flashed like molten glass. “They breed like rot. One breath of fire, and we cleanse it.”

“We can mark their nest for later,” he said, turning from her with a quiet patience that only deepened his authority. “There is a sanctum waiting, and I would rather not keep the dead waiting longer than we must.”

Roran frowned. “Leaving them doesn’t sit right. Someone else might pass through.”

“Then we leave warning marks,” Nelneras said. “They are no threat tonight. We do not need to turn every shadow to ash.” His gaze softened. “Would that make you happier, my friend?”

Roran’s ears perked. “Yup, we can smash em good later.”

Zezraya chuckled, a sound low as thunder in the ribs. “Now you’re speaking my language, wolf-boy.” Her claws dragged a mark through the damp stone, a promise and a threat, before she straightened, wings fluffing. She fell into step behind them as the golden dragon led on.

* * * * * * * *

The dwarven tunnels ended not with a door, but with a sigh.

Stone underpaw changed as the neat, sharp-cut angles of the mine giving way to an older shaping, one that followed the curve of weight and time instead of the straight line of tools. The air cooled, shed the tang of ore and lamp-smoke, and took on something else: a thin sweetness like incense long since burned out, a memory clinging to dust.

Nelneras slowed, claws quieter on the floor, wings folding tighter against his sides to keep from brushing the low ceiling. His whiskers lifted; he tasted the air like a priest tasting wine.

“Here,” he murmured as his voice dropped involuntarily. “Do you feel it?”

Roran bumped into his scales behind him. “I feel a lot of rock,” the wolven said cheerfully, peering around Nelneras’ flank. “And… you. Mostly you. Big dragon. Hard to miss.”

Axton shifted his staff, cheeks warming. “He means the… the resonance.” He cleared his throat and lifted his hand; an azure orb brightened, sending pale-blue light rolling outward. “Old magic. Consecrated spaces have a, um, frequency.”

Zezraya snorted behind them. “Ah yes. I feel the holy frequency of mildew.”

The tunnel yawned open as Axton’s light spilled through. What waited beyond was not a cavern, not a mine seam, but a hall.

The ceiling rose in a slow, deliberate arch, just high enough that Nelneras could lift his head fully without scraping horns. Pillars flanked the entry, carved in the likeness of twin figures, dragon and human standing side by side, each holding a brazier that had gone long cold. Their faces were worn to gentler lines by centuries of falling dust, but the intention remained: two shapes, equal in height, joined at the base by a single, stylized sunburst.

A mosaic spread from the threshold like a frozen dawn, pale stone and tarnished gold tesserae forming the outline of a great wing that extended into shadow. The single visible eye of the winged shape—Bahamut’s, if the old texts were right—had been inlaid with something once luminous. Now it was cracked, blind, yet still caught a shard of Axton’s light and threw it back, fainting as a sigh.

Nelneras’ joy dimmed as his gaze moved along the walls. Cracks webbed through the mosaics, centuries of moisture had turned gold leaf to dull bronze, and the once-polished floor was warped and half-collapsed near the far edge. He drew a slow breath through his nose, tail tip twitching with restrained displeasure.

“So,” he said dryly, “this is what Valcagor calls ‘pristine condition.’ I suppose to him, anything not screaming or on fire qualifies.”

Zezraya gave a low, rasping chuckle that rumbled like gravel sliding down a slope. “You give him too much credit, Goldywing. He calls it pristine because he cannot spell ‘dilapidated.’”

She ran a claw along one of the crumbled seams, flicking a bit of plaster to the ground. “If he ever saw a real ruin, he’d probably try to tax it.”

Roran barked a laugh, tail wagging. “Guess we’re lucky he just sent us instead of coming himself, huh?”

“On that, we are in perfect agreement.” Nelneras’ whiskers flicked.

Axton, meanwhile, had crouched near a fallen tile, brushing dust away with reverent fingers. “Even broken,” he murmured, “it’s beautiful.”

He drifted forward like a moth to a lantern, boots scuffing softly. His light settled into the lines of the mosaic, the cracks and missing pieces, the places where something heavy had once struck and shattered a corner of the design.

“Look,” he said, the word coming out on a startled laugh. “The wing, see how it curves? It’s not just decorative. It’s following the old celestial chart of the southern sky. There, that arc? Those are the Watcher’s stars.”

Nelneras’ eyes shone, the turquoise deepening to the hue of mountain lakes catching dawn. “Yes,” he said, voice low and warm. “And the sunburst, see how it is not a circle, but three overlapping arcs? That is the triad of ascension rites. Bahamut’s first clergy used it to mark the stages of—”

“—service, surrender, and rising,” Axton finished, the words tumbling out before he could stop them. He flushed but couldn’t quite bring himself to look away from the floor. “Sorry. I, um. Read a lot.”

Nelneras’ whiskers curled forward, amused. “Never apologize for learning.”

Zezraya padded to the edge of the mosaic, looked down at it, then up at the vaulted ceiling. Her tail flicked, sending a small avalanche of dust from a ledge above. “Wonderful. History lessons. Just what I wanted.” she said flatly. “I was promised treasure. So far, all I see are rocks. Old rocks. But still rocks.”

Nelneras ignored her, padding onward with the soft care of a creature stepping through memory. His claws met stone that thrummed faintly beneath him, as though the mountain still remembered the weight of those who had prayed here. The air felt dense, sacred, not simply with age but with intention, the way silence gathers in old sanctuaries where hope once lived loudly.

He drew a slow breath, tasting iron and dust and something fainter still, incense, perhaps, or what remained of it. The scent carried the ghost of devotion. How long had it waited here, sealed away from the world that had forgotten it? He imagined the dragons who once lay in this chamber, their wings folded beside mortal hands, their faith not in dominance but in mercy. That such a thing had ever existed filled him with aching wonder.

For a heartbeat, he forgot Zezraya’s derision. He could almost hear hymns rising again, low, resonant, the deep harmonies of dragon throats mingling with other voices. He exhaled, a tremor in it he did not bother to hide. The firelight in his eyes softened. “They carved this sanctuary together, dragon and mortal,” he said at last, his voice a hush wrapped in reverence. “You can see the variance in tool work. Smooth arcs for talon, finer strokes for hammer. A union of craft and faith.

Axton’s smile trembled with wonder. “It’s beautiful.”

“Beautiful and useless,” Zezraya muttered. “No gold veins. No weapons. Just prayers.”

Roran grinned. “Prayers can be weapons too. Mine keep me from getting eaten.”

“Then you are half-armed, pup.”

“Better than half-baked.” he shot back cheerfully.

A small sound, half laugh, half rumble escaped Nelneras. “You two may yet learn reverence, if only by accident.” His whiskers twitched as he gazed up at the vast, dust-choked dome. “Still… even silence feels holy here.”

Roran stepped carefully around her, paw pads whispering over the worn tiles. His ears perked, tail slowly wagging as he turned in a slow circle, taking it all in, the pillars, the carvings, the distant suggestion of other doorways sunk in shadow. “Reverence, how about this? It… feels kind,” he said, brow crinkling. “You know? Like a big, quiet hug. From a building.”

Zezraya stared at him as if he’d grown a second muzzle. “A building cannot hug you, pup.”

“It can in your heart.” Roran said gravely.

Nelneras moved further in, each step measured. His claws left clean, curved impressions in the dust that had lain undisturbed longer than any living mortal’s memory.

Along the base of the left-hand wall, reliefs ran in a long procession: dragons in flight not above mortals, but among them, carrying plows, lifting fallen beams, coiling protectively around market stalls. The detail had blurred with time, but the intention sang from every line.

Axton followed, unable to help himself. “This is… gods, this is before the schism myths were even consolidated. It matches the fragment from the Ambermere lower spire, the one with the partial hymn about ‘wings that till the soil.’”

Nelneras’ eyes lit. “You remember the verse.”

“‘May claws that rend the wicked be gentle with the earth,’” Axton recited softly, fingers ghosting above the carved script. “It was dismissed as apocryphal by half the scholars in Rothdell.”

“Because half the scholars in Rothdell,” Nelneras said, “had never stepped outside their city long enough to see what faith looks like where blood and rain actually meet.” There was no bite in his tone, only a weary fondness. “Here it is. In stone. A temple built for both scales and skin.”

Behind them, Zezraya huffed, pacing a little, wings flexing and settling. “You two are reciting poetry at a wall again.”

“It’s history,” Axton said, then immediately shrank a little, as if he’d overstepped. “Sorry. I just—”

Roran clapped a heavy paw on his shoulder, nearly making him stumble. “Don’t be sorry, buddy. I like it when you do the… word stuff. Feels important. My poetry is simpler. ‘Do good, hit evil, eat well.’”

“Succinct,” Zezraya said dryly. “Almost admirable.”

He beamed. “Thank you!”

“That was not praise.”

“Still counts.”

The copper dragoness groaned under her breath, muttering something about “holy fools breeding faster than kobolds.”

Nelneras half-smiled, tail flicking like a slow metronome. “Mock if you must, Zezraya, but even the dullest prayer carries a spark. Perhaps that is why Bahamut favored them.”

“Favored them enough to leave them dead in the dirt, did she?” Zezraya murmured.

Zezraya’s words dropped like a blade left to rust; quiet, but heavy enough to bite through the air. He drew breath slowly, the sound fainting against the hush of the chamber.

No anger rose in him, only that familiar ache, old as his faith. He had asked the same question once, long ago, watching fire claim the innocent while the heavens stayed silent. The gods of Sethera did not reach down. They did not smite nor shield; they whispered only through endurance, through those who chose to act when the divine did not.

He knew that. He believed that. And yet, in this place, before these worn carvings and broken wings, belief hurt.

“Faith,” he said at last, his voice steady but quiet, “is not measured by what the gods spare us from, but by what they trust us to endure.”

“Hmph. Sounds like something priests tell themselves when the world stops listening.”

Roran squinted at the carvings. “Hells, they sure didn’t build small, did they? Bet the ceilings made the prayers echo twice as loud. Guess when you’re a dragon, subtlety’s optional.”

“This was but one place,” Nelneras said. He moved toward a pair of broad archways at the back of the hall, each flanked by more pillars, on the left, the pillars carved in the likeness of dragons bowing their heads; on the right, pillars of mortals kneeling with hands uplifted. “Likely a regional temple. A place where dragons and mortals came together to remember they shared a sky.”

Zezraya’s tail lashed once. “And yet here we are, crawling through its corpse because dragons fattened themselves on that sky.” She tilted her head, looking up at the shadowed vault. “Forgive me if I do not feel moved to weep.”

Nelneras’ jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “You mistake reverence for blindness, Claw of the Molten Path,” he said, still gentle, but with a spine of steel. “I know the crimes of our kind. That is why places like this matter.”

“What matters,” she replied, “is that Valcagor’s coffers are bleeding to keep your fields alive. He sent me to make certain his investment does not wander off the righteous path of paying its debts.”

Roran opened his mouth. “You know, I always thought righteousness was more about—”

“Roran,” Axton said mildly, hand touching his arm. “Maybe let that one go.”

“Oh. Right.” He paused. “But just so we’re clear, righteous path or not, if anything tries to eat us, I’m hitting it.”

“That,” Zezraya said, “is the one thing we agree on.”

Nelneras drew in a slow breath, let it out, and turned his attention to the twin archways again. The left-hand passage was half-collapsed, the lintel cracked through with a jagged line that had taken a portion of the ceiling with it. The right-hand passage remained more intact, though the stone door that had once sealed it hung shattered, hinges warped.

The carvings changed, less graceful now, lines jagged, strokes hurried, as if the sculptors’ hands had trembled at the end. Axton’s light wavered over gouged glyphs, whole verses marred by claws.

“Someone tried to erase this,” he whispered. “Look, these cuts are deliberate.”

Nelneras lowered his head, studying the scars. “Not dwarven tools. These were made by talons… and long ago.”

He stared longer than he meant to. What fury could drive one of their kind to desecrate Bahamut’s shrine? He imagined claws, his own, raking through sanctified marble, driven by grief or madness. He imagined the sound, the thunder of faith breaking, and his chest tightened. Had the Emperor’s war reached even here? Or had some fallen servant defaced her memory out of guilt?

His breath came out in a soft plume of gold smoke. “Whatever ended this place, it was not collapse. It was fury.”

Zezraya shifted her weight, claws scraping stone. “So, your goddess’s faithful built a shrine to peace. Someone came along and smashed it.” She shrugged, the motion sending a dull clink through the old hall. “Story of the world.”

“Not the only story.” Nelneras said quietly.

For a moment he simply stood there, head bowed near the broken door, the glow of Axton’s light painting his gold in softer, almost human hues. He looked less like a dragon and more like a memory of one, a boy raised under open skies, trying to reconcile every story he’d ever read with the ruin in front of him.

Axton watched him, throat tight. “We can still learn from it,” he said, more gently now. “Even broken. Maybe especially broken.”

Nelneras looked at him then, and something eased around his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly so.”

He straightened his feathers along his wings whispering as they settled. “We go on. There will be a central hall, perhaps a sanctum. If we are fortunate, the archives or a reliquary survived.” He glanced back at the collapsed left-hand arch. “This side is too compromised. We take the right.”

Zezraya’s tail flicked. “As long as the right leads us toward coin and not another sermon.”

Roran rolled his shoulders, grip tightening on his hammer. “Forward it is. Deeper hugs.”

“Please do not call them that.” Axton muttered, though the corner of his mouth betrayed a smile.

They passed through the broken doorway in single file: Nelneras first, ducking his head; Axton at his flank, orb held high; Roran next, ears perked for the groan of stone; Zezraya bringing up the rear, gaze sharper than her claws, wings half-spread in case the ceiling decided to misbehave.

The corridor sloped gently downward. Here the walls were closer, carved with simpler lines of processional script, ranks of tiny figures carrying offerings, dragons overhead in stylized arcs. Dust lay so thick in places that Axton’s boots left clear prints, and Nelneras’ passing stirred small eddies that hung in the light like ghost-mist.

“Feels narrower,” Roran said softly. “Like the mountain’s breathing on us.”

“It is merely weight.” Zezraya replied. Nevertheless, her tail curled nearer to her hindlegs.

A hairline crack ran along the ceiling above, branching like a dead tree’s limbs. Nelneras’ eyes tracked it automatically. “Stay close to the center,” he advised. “The edges have taken more strain.”

They obeyed without argument. Even Zezraya.

For perhaps a dozen dragon-lengths, there was only the hush of steps and the soft murmur of Axton and Nelneras trading observations in regards to script variants, about artistic style, or how a certain curve of engraving matched an obscure hymn from a half-burned scroll in Ambermere. They stepped around a fallen frieze, the stone depicting a dragon coiled protectively around a cluster of children, all their faces worn away.

Then the mountain shifted.

It began as a subtle tremor under their feet, a shiver, like a beast twitching in its sleep. Dust filtered down from the crack overhead in a lazy drift.

Roran’s ears snapped upright. “Uh. Nel?”

Nelneras opened his mouth to answer and the world answered first. With a groan like the deep grinding of old ice, the crack widened. Stones sheared somewhere behind them, out of sight. The floor jolted, and a thunderous roar rolled up the corridor as if something vast and unseen had finally decided to let go.

“Move!” Zezraya barked. Her voice cut through the noise like a blade.

They surged forward. Behind them, the passage they’d come through collapsed in a series of booming crashes, stone slamming into stone, the sound chasing them like the fall of an avalanche. A gust of stale wind shoved at their backs as air was displaced.

Nelneras threw his weight into his stride, shepherding Axton ahead with one sweep of a wing. Roran leaped over a fallen block, grabbed a slipping Axton by the back of his robe, and hauled, half-carrying him the last few paces.

When at last the noise subsided, they stood panting in a slightly wider pocket of hall where the ceiling dipped lower but held. Behind them, the passage was gone, a solid wall of shattered blocks and powdered mortar, dust still floating down.

Silence fell, heavy and close. Only their breathing disturbed it.

Roran broke it first, rubbing grit from his fur. “Well,” he said with forced brightness, “that could’ve gone worse. Nobody’s flat, nobody’s missing limbs. So… success?”

Zezraya gave him a look sharp enough to peel bark. “If this is your standard for success, pup, I pray I never see failure.”