Page 94 of Elemental Becoming
Then, at last, she speaks.
“What you are asking . . . is not a thing that is given. Not because it is withheld—but because it is not whole.”
I swallow, my thoughts turning faster, trying to make sense of it.
“You speak of the wards. The eggs. You feel the connection.”A pause.“That is not wrong.”
My pulse quickens.
“Then something is happening,”I press.“Something is changing.”
“Yes.”
The word lands with quiet certainty.
Calryx is silent for a moment, her wings shifting as she catches the current.
“Your Archivist already knows more than most,”she says at last.“The histories. The prophecies. The old fractures between the Clans.”
A pause.
“But knowledge is not the same as understanding.”
I frown, thinking of the research Valen has been doing and what he’s shared already.
“He sees the pieces,” she continues. “But not yet how they fit together.”
The wind rushes around us as her wings tilt slightly.
“None of us do.”
“Then you do know something,”I say.
“I know what the world feels like,”Calryx replies.“I know when it shifts. When something moves where it should not.”
A beat.
“The eggs should not be still.”
Velkar’s Descent.
The memory surfaces, sharp and sudden.
Valen stood before us, telling the history of that sacred place—the wards, the dragons who had poured their magics into them to hold the realm together. He spoke of the eggs too, how they had stopped hatching, and how that meant wards were weakening.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand it. I didn’t know how the wards were sustained, only that they were—and that they were failing.
Before those lessons, I had never even thought to question it.
My world had been fields and village roads, the predictable rhythm of something small and contained. When rumors of the wards weakening reached us, they felt distant. A problem for somewhere else. Something that would never touch us.
A chill runs through me.
“And the wards?”I ask.
She does not answer immediately.
“I have never known them to weaken,”she says at last.
