"I'm dead," Horatio said, flopped over on a cushion. "You can't make do anything, Arthur, because I'm already dead. And dead people just lay here and don't move."
Arthur had co back to the rooms to find Horatio, Cressida, and Joy laid out in various places, groaning like they were actively dying... and not in fact, dead. Even Soledad and Marion looked a little wilted. Their two young dragons who were fast asleep and hadn't even twitched an eyelid at Brixaby's appearance.
Arthur had been concerned at first, worried they had been forced to pay the blood price.
But that wasn't the case. Sams, who was the only one who seed to be his usual self, was sitting out on a ledge to catch the cool night air. He poked his head in and looked down his nose at Horatio. "I’ve told you before that you have allowed yourself to beco too soft. Now, you have finally experienced a day of normal training."
Horatio groaned and threw a pillow at his dragon which hit him on the tip of the nose. "No one at Buck Moon trained like this, Sams."
"Well, no," the Yellow allowed, "but intense periods of training are not unheard of."
"Wait, you guys were just training?" Arthur asked.
Cressida grunted sothing. She had her arm thrown over her eyes as if the light in the room was just too much for her to bear. "Beryl is ruthless. He ran us in formation drills over and over again. I think that Joy and I can now do them in our sleep. Then he took a break to go to so fancy eting and had one of his assistants take over. And we had to do it all over again. Do you know how hot it was today? We didn't get any water or any break."
"You think that was hard? You aren't even the one with the wings," Joy complained, not sounding very much like her normal chipper self. She was stretched out as much as she possibly could, even her wings, to touch as much of the cool stone as possible.
Equinox must not have been completely passed out because he raised his head from Soledad's lap. "At least you guys can fly," he complained. "I just had to stand there and flap and flap and flap. Then when I couldn't flap anymore, we had to walk in place pretending that we were part of a wing. Back and forth, back and forth..."
"And I had to listen to tactics," Soledad said. "There was even a test... which I think I flunked by the way. Sorry, Arthur. I got the hang of writing in your crazy language, but I swear there's sothing wrong with it. Who puts the verbs before the nouns? That ain't right."
"Well, I thought the tactics were fascinating," Marion said, then shrank a little as Soledad gave him a hard glare. "Though the class was technically a little dry."
Asha didn't even bother to join the conversation. She was still curled up asleep and snorting little dragon snorts. Apparently, flapping her wings and marching had completely worn her out.
Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. “The rest of my wing will be here in a few minutes. You have to give a good first impression."
This got another round of groans and a couple of muttered curses.
"Look," Arthur said, "I can make you so juice with a few restorative herbs—"
"Nothing addictive," Marion said sternly.
"It's not addictive," Arthur said, "and this is important. I need you to all perk up and be professionals."
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This got a whole new round of complaints from everybody, and Horatio threw his other pillow at Arthur—and missed him.
Arthur battled down his frustration and only partially succeeded. He knew his friends were exhausted. They felt comfortable venting at him in a way that they never could to their real wing captain, but this was serious.
"You think this is bad," he said with an edge to his voice, "you haven't actually seen sobody pay the blood price with their life force." He turned to his dragon who was glowering at all of them in a corner. "Brixaby, tell them."
Brixaby straightened up. "When Chester sucked the life force out of that rider, his dragon also felt it. He collapsed where he stood, and if he had been close to the ledge, he would have fallen over." He paused. “No one lent him any help.”
"That's terrible," Joy murmured.
But Brixaby wasn't done. "Furthermore, I watched him age before my eyes. So of his scales sloughed off and others withered. It was not as if ti actually advanced for him, because he did not grow—All dragons grow with ti. He simply... faded."
"I noticed the sa with his rider, too," Arthur said into the stunned silence. "Until Brixaby told what he saw, I’d halfway convinced myself that it was a trick of the light. But like Brixaby said, when Chester was done, the rider had more gray hairs, and I could swear there were wrinkles where there hadn't been before."
"Co to think of it," Marion said quietly, "a lot of the Commons I have seen are a little older than what I'd say are average. But like you, I didn't note it. We haven't been here for long, so I hadn't caught the thought of it as a pattern until now."
"So, he's... sucking away people's youth?" Cressida sat up. "What is he using it for?"
"I don't know," Arthur said. "Maybe just himself. Chester... he's young. Maybe only a couple years older than . Whatever power he's using, I think so of it is bouncing back to strengthen him. The other two Legendary riders are older too. That's to be expected because legendary dragons are hatched so infrequently. Doesn’t explain Chester, though."
"How sure are you?" Horatio asked.
"Not sure at all," Arthur said, "it all fits, but it's a guess."
Cressida sat up completely. She looked haggard. Her normally pinned back neat hair had many more flyaways than usual, and the bun had beco loose. It said sothing that she had not bothered to put it back into place yet.
"Okay, I'm with you so far, and to be honest none of this surprises because we all knew that Blood Moon Hive had a terrible reputation. But... what do we do about it?"
"And how do and Equinox help you?" Soledad asked with a frown. "He can't fly yet, which ans that during the next eruption, he can't get close enough to blast anything. I'm not taking him out on foot," she added as if Arthur would ever suggest she do such a thing.
Marion put in, " and Asha can at least heal either together or apart." He glanced at Soledad and nodded. "But we have to be careful when using our powers. We might have helped a few too many people at the tent last ti. It was just luck the other day that we weren't caught. It's hard to see soone suffering when you know that you can help. If we went to the eruption... it might be worse—"
"No," Arthur cut him off. "I won't require you two to go to the eruption." Then he paused for a mont before he added, "At least, not the upcoming ones."
He saw that Cressida got it first. Her eyes went from curious to a little alard, and then bright with eagerness.
"Wait," Soledad said, "you an we're going to go back to New Houston? Those fissures that you guys got all those shards out of?"
Yes, they had gotten so wealth out of the Dark Heart, but the majority of it had co from the old fissures. And they'd had a few weeks to delve them after they had returned from the Dark Heart, too.
"Only if we need to," Arthur told her. "I don't know how active they're going to be now that the dark heart has harvested, and the cycle is beginning all over again."
But Soledad’s imagination had been captured by the idea. "There's usually a dark heart opening near so city-state. We could just hang around until rumor cos down of where the next one is, then head over there. Rinse and repeat.”
“None of the crazy blood price stuff," Horatio muttered. "That's my vote."
"No," Arthur said with a shake of his head. "I don't think there's even a need to go that far."
"Then what?" Horatio asked. “I like the age I am, and I don't want to depend on having a good eruption to keep from being sucked into old age."
Cressida wrinkled her nose. "Can you say that... any other way?"
"What?" Horatio asked.
"Guys," Arthur said, "we have everything we need in our kingdom."
Everybody looked at him and he smiled. "We just had an eruption here. I want to take the wing and find out if there's anything left of it."
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