eyes shut, but even with his eyes closed, he could still see. He borrowed from the energy of the ice dragon and was able to see far down below, even without his eyes open. “And now I find that I want to protect them, but I don’t know if I can. It seems everything I have tried to do, every way I’ve attempted to intervene on behalf of the dragons, has led me here, but here is a place where I can do nothing.”
“There are things that you can still do,” she said.
“I’m not entirely convinced there are,” Jason said. “Had I not intervened, had the dragon misfits not been freed and bound to me, I couldn’t help but wonder if Lorach would have stopped attempting to come after them.”
In the time he’d been working with the others from Dragon Haven, he had come to know that the rebellion wasn’t really all that effective. There were aspects of it that had continued fighting. The Dragon Guard had continued to battle, trying to put some distance between Lorach and Dragon Haven, using their attacks to disrupt Lorach from learning where to even find Dragon Haven. Still, everything he had done didn’t matter the way he once believed it did.
“There was a time when I would’ve wanted to see hundreds of dragons flying the way they are, flying apparently freely, no Dragon Souls riding atop them.” He closed his eyes briefly. There was that vision again, the one he wanted almost as much as the dragons. And it was here… only it was not quite what he’d dreamed. “There’s something wrong to it, as well.”
The energy of the dragons was all off. As he stared, focusing in the distance, looking down into the darkness of the swirling dragons, Jason could feel just how wrong it was, and he was aware of the power that was down there, power that seemed to influence those dragons, power that seemed to affect them in a way that it should not.
As much as he wanted to overwhelm it, he couldn’t.
He stared, feeling the energy, feeling the power, and distantly, he was still aware of that pulsation and that summons that continued to draw the dragons, but also the people of Dragon Haven, toward this location.
The egg. That was what this was tied to, though Jason didn’t have any idea why she would be calling them here toward an egg.
He had to help the people of Dragon Haven. And the dragons.
That had been his purpose since being freed from his village.
Protecting the dragons was obvious, but there remained a debt he owed to Dragon Haven. He owed them his safety, a debt that had permitted him to find something he hadn’t known before.
Purpose.
When he had been in his village, Jason hadn’t known any purpose. He had known nothing other than the cold and the torment and the sadness that life in the village offered. It had taught him about the cold, about being taunted and bullied, and it had taught him about camouflage. It had taught him lessons he had needed to first connect to the dragons. They were lessons he had not known he needed, but without them, Jason would never have been able to connect to the misfits the way that he had.
Coming to Dragon Haven had changed that for him. It had given him something else, something he had not known, something he had not even known he had wanted.
It had given him a bond and a connection he still didn’t fully understand. It had given him a way of reaching the dragons, and it had given him people who were like him, people who wanted for something more than just themselves.
Perhaps that was the greatest part of it all.
Because he had come to Dragon Haven, he began to know the power of the dragons.
He closed his eyes, feeling the dragons there, the sense that flowed out around him. In time, he had freed a considerable number of dragons. He still wanted to free the remaining dragons, and he still wanted to do everything in his power in order to protect them all. The difference now was that he didn’t know if he would be able to do so.
He took a deep breath, letting it out.
“After we deal with this egg, we have to go to Lorach,” he said to the ice dragon. “It’s time to end this for good.”
“Yes,” the ice dragon said.
“I don’t know if we can do it,” Jason said. Or