especially as he had continued to change.
Jason reached for that power.
When he did, he felt the energy of the night dragon flow into him. It filled him. The energy of the night dragon was there, exploding within him. As he held onto that power, something changed. Darkness began to swirl around him.
“What is that?” Janeya asked.
Jason didn’t get the opportunity to explain.
The darkness continued to build, flowing, and Jason suddenly recognized just what it was. It wasn’t only the power of the night dragon.
The night dragon was coming to him.
That awareness deep inside his mind had not shifted at all, unlike when the other dragons approached. He was amorphous, a smear of darkness, but within that dark cloud of energy was the power of the night dragon and the truth of his existence.
The night dragon appeared before him.
He was darkness, he was the inky black of night, but he was also power.
Small—no larger than he had ever been—he was still incredibly powerful.
“How are you here?” Jason asked.
“Because you called me here,” the night dragon said.
“Did you feel what happened?”
“Did I feel you using the energies of the world in order to create life?”
Jason looked over at the eggs. “Was that what I did?”
The night dragon laughed, a strange and dark sound. “In a way. Dragons leave behind something of themselves when they depart the world, and what you did was imbue that something with an aspect of life, an aspect of energy, and you added the power that you were able to grant and changed something for them.”
The night dragon swirled around the eggs and tendrils of darkness began to shimmer, floating around the eggs, floating around the night dragon, and Jason felt the power the night dragon used on them.
It was a strange and subtle sort of energy, but the longer that he continued to push that power out, the more Jason was able to detect just what the night dragon was doing. He was cycling, circling around the eggs, but he was also influencing them. The power of the night dragon began to flow into them.
“What are you doing?”
“I am simply speeding along the natural progression of things,” the night dragon said.
“Why?”
“Because it must be done,” the night dragon said.
Power again filled the eggs, but this time it was different than the kind of power Jason had been giving them, a different sort of energy .
It reminded Jason of how he and the other dragons had fed the night dragon. It was connected to power, but it was connected to the power of the night dragon, not to anything else.
The power of the night dragon flowed into each of the eggs.
And then it began to build.
Jason questioned whether or not there might be something more that he might be able to add to it. As he attempted do, he felt the night dragon resist him. Darkness swirled toward him and the night dragon’s face turned toward him, his eyes looking like black pools of night. The night dragon pressed that energy into Jason.
“No. You must save yourself.”
Jason held onto the energy within him and focused, trying to see if there might be something more he would be able to add to what the night dragon did, but even as he did, he didn’t know if it even mattered. The eggs started to tremble.
Jason backed away, looking over at Janeya.
The trembling took on the energy of the earth, the energy of the storm dragon, and it took on the energy of each of the dragons that made up these eggs. Gradually, Jason recognized that trembling, he recognized how that trembling continued to flow, building within those eggs, building outward, filling them with a source of power.
The night dragon continued to swirl around them, and as he did, the eggs trembled and power exploded in them.
There came a flash of darkness, followed by a strange light.
Then power bloomed.
Jason had never experienced anything quite like it before. The sudden blooming of power erupted all around him, giving him a sense of dragons, but also giving him a sense of the power of those dragons, the way they filled him with their energy. It came from all of the dragon eggs.
Not just dragon eggs. Not anymore.
Now they were dragons.
The dragons were drawing upon energy. It was different than the energy that had come off Jason, different than the power that he had exuded, and this energy was not just the power of him, or the other misfits, or even the powers of