I have been drifting alone for a long time.

  I don't actually know how long it's been since I put myself into this magical stasis to create the dampening field over Sanctuary Isle that prevents the priesthood from working magic against our people.

  They call this region the Quiet.

  In this meditative state, I can't see the seasons pass; can only feel the presence and absence of those with powerful magic as they come and go.

  And, in one case, speak.

  But it's been a long time since the dragon has spoken to me.

  Besides the dragon—and only the one has ever visited—no one besides a sage, the most powerful magic users in the world, can even get close enough to approach Celestial Sanctuary Temple. And if they do, the magic of the Quiet suppresses their power.

  Even animals sense the unnaturalness and stay away from the temple.

  And nothing here changes.

  I wonder sometimes if anything changed, when I put this into motion.

  The dragon used to tell me that it mattered. But it's been a long time since he told me what the world is like now.

  I wonder if he thinks I'll give up and die if I know it's useless.

  I wonder if it is worth holding, after all this time.

  Maybe I've done enough.

  Maybe I mattered once, but not anymore.

  Then suddenly, as if my roaming thoughts summoned him, I feel the dragon's magic.

  I always sense him sooner than anyone else, even the sages.

  Perhaps it's because he's a dragon, but before I created the Quiet I'd met—and killed—other dragons.

  And this dragon, I recognized him the first moment I laid eyes on him, before I hatched this plan.

  Before our eyes met, I knew what he was, and I could see he knew that I knew.

  And then he turned away from me, like I couldn't do anything, wasn't worth anything.

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  I'd been unreasonably hurt, considering I didn't know him, that we were supposed to be enemies—

  And that I agreed.

  That moment had changed something for me. Given me the clarity I needed to turn away from the path I was on, to give me the power to create the Quiet.

  I recognize the feel of dragon's magic in my current meditative state, even though I've never seen him since.

  I'm walled into a chamber in the temple. I can't see anyone.

  But I can feel his approach now.

  He's moving fast.

  Only then do I realize that I can feel more people, too—many more people than have tried to come here in a long time.

  They slow as the power of the dampening aura hits them but don't stop, their magic fading the closer they get.

  But that I can feel it at all at this distance means they are priests working in concert, making a concerted effort to combat the effects of the Quiet—to pursue him?

  Is the dragon being hunted?

  In some ways, dragons and sages are not so different. We're both born powerful, and everyone wants our power for themselves.

  The difference is that sages have been made to serve others and spend our power, whereas dragons only serve themselves and hoard their power—

  And the priesthood will always hunt them that alone: for the raw magical power contained in their scales.

  For priests to pursue the dragon this far into the Quiet, for him to be fleeing rather than fighting...

  I don't feel much in my current state. I can't, not without breaking the magic that maintains the Quiet.

  But a sense of foreboding creeps into my still bones.

  The dragon stops outside the temple, because of course not even he can enter.

  By the shape of the magic I sense, he's in human form—the memory of brilliant blue hair and icy eyes over his alabaster skin and slight build flashes through my mind, and I wonder if he still looks like that.

  I'm wondering a lot, today.

  The sense of his magic is also fainter than I've felt it in... no, it's never been this low, not in my memory.

  That's why he's running. He can't fight the priests in this state.

  If they make it up to the temple, even with them weakened, he still won't be able to fight all of them, which he must realize.

  It crashes through me at once with crystal clarity:

  The dragon came here to die.

  At the hands of priests.

  And all at once, my long-banked wrath—my strength, my heart—crashes through me.

  This dragon, intentionally or not, opened my mind, enabling me to save people when the priests of my time would have had me murder them en masse for their own gain.

  This dragon has been the one constant in all the time I've been drifting, when I gave him nothing at all.

  I did not hold the Quiet this long only for him to die for it.

  Maybe I don't matter anymore. Maybe I never did.

  But maybe I can do one last thing with my life.

  In this magical stasis, my body doesn't move, which makes doing much harder.

  But wrath is powerful, especially when I can see the situation with perfect clarity:

  The priests cannot have this dragon.

  And I can stop them.

  The mental kata that I've turned into a meditation is a hard habit to break, the habit of years.

  And it takes more will to break habits than to start them.

  But I feel my power flaring, know that I will be glowing the same magenta as my eyes if there were anyone here to see as I gather my wrath, my will, and move.

  That's all it takes: Movement.

  Simple; powerful.

  I clench a fist.

  And the Quiet shatters.

  The dampening field has always felt in my mind kind of like a miasma, a powerful magical aura unfurling from me at the center out around in a sphere.

  Now, it feels like a glass globe that has splintered into a million shards, a breaking, before the magic begins to dissipate into the air.