Nice Dragons Finish Last

Epilogue

Hours later, Chelsie, Bethesda’s Shade, returned to Heartstriker Mountain. After securing and disarming her idiot brother, and taking a brief shower to get the ash out of her hair, she strapped two Fangs of the Heartstriker to her hips and went to report to her mother.

Bethesda was in her usual spot, lounging on her favorite piles of gold in all her feathery, rainbow-hued glory. She was staring off into the middle distance, dragging her manicured claws through the seemingly empty air in front of her as she worked the enormous custom AR interface required to run her empire. “That’s it,” she announced when Chelsie walked in. “The world’s gone mad. Do you know what I just received?”

“A declaration of war from Algonquin?” Chelsie guessed.

“You’re not still upset about that nonsense in the DFZ, are you?” Bethesda said. “I told you, it wasn’t Justin’s fault. He’s young—overly energetic and aggressive, you know how boys get. You shouldn’t be so hard on him.”

Chelsie let out a silent, angry breath. It was her job to be hard on them so Bethesda could be free to play the doting mother. They both knew this, but for some reason, Bethesda enjoyed pretending her role wasn’t just that: a role. But Chelsie had played this game with her mother for a long, long time, and she’d learned the hard way to keep her anger to herself. “What did you receive?”

“Hmm?” Bethesda said. “Oh, that. I got a message just now from Ian praising Julius to the rafters. Julius! You know, the runty one?”

“I know who Julius is,” Chelsie said. “What did Ian say?”

“Oh, some nonsense about Estella and rescuing some Three Sisters dragon,” she answered blithely. “Nothing you’d be interested in.” Which Chelsie understood was Bethesda-speak for ‘things you should already know about that I don’t want to explain.’

“Anyway,” her mother went on. “Apparently Ian believes little Julius pulled off quite the coup. He even suggests that I unseal him. Says I should make a big show about it for the others, too. Something inspirational like ‘hard work brings reward’ and ‘even the lowest of us can achieve,’ that sort of thing.”

Chelsie nodded. “Sounds reasonable. Will you do it?”

“I haven’t decided,” Bethesda said. “I just don’t see what’s in it for me. Julius is doing so well being sealed. Why should I mess with what works? I don’t want to unseal him and give him an excuse to go right back to slacking.” She tapped a gilded claw thoughtfully against her fangs. “No, I think I’ll let him stew a bit longer, see what else he can pull off now that he’s properly motivated.”

“Then I’ll be going back to the DFZ,” Chelsie said. “Brohomir’s up to something.”

“Brohomir’s always up to something,” Bethesda replied proudly. “It’s the seer in him. That and he’s a genius.”

Chelsie shook her head, but her mother was already reabsorbed in the invisible display in front of her, and she took the opportunity to make a quiet escape. As soon as she was in the hall, she pulled out her phone, tapping the screen as she tried to remember how to get to the actual phone part of this particular model.

She got a new phone every week, and never saved her contacts. Phones were too easily lost or compromised to trust with something as important as her list of Heartstriker private numbers. She did keep a secret backup on an old-style data stick hidden in her boot, but she didn’t need it for Bob. Her eldest brother had had the same number for over a hundred years, and Chelsie knew it by heart.

She dialed quickly, and then settled against the wall to wait while she went through the four full cycles of rings and voicemail Bob always put her through when she called. Finally, just before his voicemail picked up for the fifth time, the phone clicked, and a bright voice said, “I feel so popular.”

“Do we really have to go through this every time? One of these days, it’s going to be really important.”

“Nonsense, Chelsie-lamb,” Bob said. “That’s the thing about being a seer: I always know when it’s important.”

She frowned. To the casual listener, the words would sound flippant, but Chelsie knew her brother, and to her, Bob sounded distracted. Distracted and worried. “What are you doing with that boy?”

“Julius?” Bob said. “Oh, just helping him grow, reach his full potential, providing a good male role model, all that big brother stuff.”

Since the hall was empty, Chelsie permitted herself an eye roll. “Seriously.”

Bob sighed. “I’m going to need someone soon,” he admitted, his voice deepening and darkening to its real tone. “There’s a storm coming. I can see it, but I can’t see through it, or beyond. All I know is that we are approaching a crux, and one of us is going to have to make a choice that will either doom or save the entire clan.”

“And you chose Julius?” Chelsie cried. “Why not me? Why not Amelia? There are ten clutches worth of Heartstrikers. Surely one of them is more qualified than Mr. Nice Dragon.”

“It’s precisely Julius’s failure that makes him so perfect,” Bob replied. “Most dragons have absolutely no idea what to make of him, but I have, through rigorous testing, discovered that Julius is, in fact, remarkably predictable if you understand his thinking.”

“And you do?”

“Of course not,” Bob said, chuckling. “Do I look nice? But the point is that Julius’s actions are internally consistent, and yet he is such an atypical dragon, none of us can reliably predict what he’s going to do. He’s both unpredictable and entirely predictable at the same time! And that, little sister, makes him the best chance we have. Trust me.”

“I do,” Chelsie said, leaning hard against the stone wall. “I just wish you’d make it a little easier.”

“That would be no fun at all,” Bob said. “See you in a month!”

She went stiff. “What happens in a month?”

But Bob had already hung up, leaving Chelsie alone in the hall with only her worries and the distant echo of Bethesda’s cackling laughter for company.