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“I can read your thoughts. Do not shoot at me, Alessio. It would not bode well.”

Brendin stepped away from the exit a moment.  The reptile was four-legged, clearly defining it as a true dragon and not a wyvern, which was a relief.  Brendin had no desire to ever encounter another wyvern in his lifetime, even if his previous illness meant he was immune to the disease they carried.  And this dragon could both speak and read minds.  Perhaps all dragons could do that.  Brendin didn’t know; as far as he was aware dragons were extinct.  The closest he’d ever experienced was seeing Darkwing, the tarragon that lived in the caverns below Ironstorm.  And that was only once, at night and during a storm.

Brendin laid a hand on Alessio’s shoulder.  “Lower your bow,” he whispered to the boy.  “If he wanted we’d already be dead.”
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The camp was small, barely much of a camp in fact.  A simple fire and a blanket laid on the sands for her to sleep on.  Beside the blanket on her outspread cloak lay the talwar, sheathed, its white gem at the hilt twinkling in the fading sunlight.  She wished she’d thrown it away, or had Ramseur melt it perhaps.

Jericho glanced at the sky.  She wasn’t far from his den in the northern caves.  She could ask him to destroy the blade.  But the woman decided against it and instead transferred it to the blanket as she put her cloak back on and kicked sand into the fire to smother it.  The smoke would attract mandkors at night.  Then Jericho wrapped herself in her cloak and laid on the blanket, one hand on the hilt of her talwar, as she let her consciousness drift into the space surrounding her.

When she opened her eyes again she was no longer lying on a blanket in the middle of the Natradan Desert, but instead in a small chamber with many narrow torchlit corridors leading elsewhere and away.  Shakti was different here; she could feel it flow faster, more chaotically, whirling and eddying around her.

Carefully sliding her talwar into her belt, Jericho picked the corridor that she could faintly sense other presences from, and began to wander down.