Abyss.

Space, yet nothing above or below or behind or between to fill it.

Silence, until the very lack of sound seeps into a being already gills from terror.

And then…

Is it a light? Dim, blue-black, a patch of the ocean discolored. Is it a shadow?

There are no shadows when there is no luminence to cast them.

It draws closer, resolves itself into small dots, patterned in whorls that invoke a sense of a whirlpool. A rakish thing appears out of the gloom, a face, rankled and contorted by great pressure. Its body brushes past with a sweep of a giant tail and it is gone.

Welcome to the Deep.

Hello, my name is Riptide. You might remember me from the histories; perhaps, perhaps not. I was born in the peculiar summer of 5,002 after the scorching, amidst the most intense period of the war (which barely anybody likes to talk about nowadays, and accounts of which can hardly be extracted from most veterans, those people being reticent). It was at the end of the war in five thousand and eleven that I learned I was not counted as a youngster, but as a member of the old guard by my friends Fin and Cerulean. How I departed from the much-despised Talons of Peace, and ingratiated myself with the Seawing body politic (whom heretofore had hated me because of my father being Webs), is a story for another time, but I will take some time to summarize it here.

I, being a middling student of oceanography, had attended Jade Mountain on probationary terms, and met Fin there, he teaching cartography in the spring of oh '13. He was an odd fellow; kind and thrifty; his cave was threadbare of the usual comforts and decadence of royalty when I visited him, but instead plastered with maps strung up on sticky gum from the Rainwing kingdom. Unlike most dragons, he wore no jewelry.

"Cerulean told me you were a cartographer. I trust we have something in common?"

Fin's scales rippled a Seawing greeting, and mine shone back.

"Hello there. Northwest-by-north-by-west or northwest-by-west-by-north, that is my question."

I looked at his map from the other side; he had a pointer and compass lined between two islands and was making sense of it. "Nearer northwest-by-west-by-north, I should think. It's almost perfectly between the two, but I think the west one is a degree closer."

"Well, thank you," said Fin. "You have sharp eyes."

"I was a lookout."

Fin glanced at me for the first time in our meeting.

"We all were, at some point or another, we older folks."

I smiled. Though his luminescent swirls marked him as a royal, here was a dragon who had few of the marks of an uptight prince. His we had instantly closed the gap between strangers and made us into acquaintances. Perhaps he had a sense of humor. Then he went on.

"You said Cerulean told you of me," said Fin.

"I met him in passing," I said. "And I have forgotten my manners. My name is Riptide."

This was the point where many of my to-be friendships generally ended. A Seawing would echo me. 'Riptide?' He would say, and carry on the conversation with a strong undercurrent – heh – of disappointment and perhaps betrayal. He would excuse himself on some business, and I would never see him again. This was what I half-expected now.

"Your reputation precedes you," said Fin. "You are a cartographer, no?"

"I took up a path in oceanography. Close, but no anemone."

He chuckled. We talked a little after that; finished the maps and looked over one of his presentations. He was exceptionally neat, tidy and organized; there was a drawer for presentations on each quadrant of the Seawing kingdom, and then on each kingdom of the rest of Pyrrhia, and pencil-sketched outlines of a faraway land that had not yet been inked.

"What's this?" I asked, running a talon over the coast.

"There was an affair," said Fin. "Based on the observations Tsunami made when she visited the lost continent. She didn't tell you?"

"She didn't remark much about it on the whole," I said. "Too busy with other matters."

"Oh, a falling out."

"I wasn't doing enough brave things. What with the war out and all I think attending a dragonet shower is bravery, but your sister seems to disagree."

Another chuckle.

"I could never stand the chatter," said Fin. "Not even for my younger brothers. I don't think the fathers are enthusiastic, either."

"If any dragon would be excited it would be the fathers."

We spent an inordinate amount of time sizing each other up; I remarking on my accomplishments and he seeing if he could beat them. At the end of it he was one-down for fighting experience, but I had had to admit I knew less about the surface of Pyrrhia than he, who had stored up in his brain all sorts of peculiar things such as the volume of nearly every river and stream in every kingdom that had ever existed, and the grades of the hills and climes down to the composition of the rocks. He was a veritable library of facts, remarkable and unremarkable, and next to him my geographical knowledge was pale and lackluster as an albino cave lobster.

When I came out of the cave it was dusk; a spectacular gradient of blue and purple and the deepest of reds, the color of the clouds most closely resembling the surface of indigo grapes, the smooth bases surpassed by the varied peaks of the mountains. I lingered there awhile, then remembered I had studies to attend to. My procrastination cost me dearly, for even after I retrieved the relevant class material from the mess that passed for a room I burned a number of candles to stubs going to after midnight. Indeed I awoke late the next morning with a throbbing headache and little gain in my knowledge, if any.

I bumped into Prince Cerulean at breakfast.

"Had a bad night of it?" he asked.

I was blearily staring at the catfish before me.

"I can't decide if this is worth eating," I said. "I've had a lot of interesting breakfasts, but except for the maggots I don't think I've ever seen something so unappetizing."

Cerulean leaned in over the table with one elbow propped up on the furniture and the other three legs balancing him on the uneven stone, uniformly blue scales relaxed with good humor, whereas mine were bunched up with lack of sleep.

"Get a drink, you maligned rebel," he said. "I can't guarantee all your meal will still be here when you get back, but I'll safeguard it if you give me half."

"Get thee away, rascal," I said. "I know you'd love to have half my meal, but you won't; I say you can't have it."

"If I eat it, does that mean you'll forcibly extract the half-digested remnants from my belly?"

"Yes."

"Sounds murder-y."

"I kill for catfish."

He shook his head knowingly and I departed for a sip of fresh water, cool and refreshing to my parched throat, though I kept my eyes on Cerulean as I drank. He mimed taking a big bite of food while I looked, but he didn't take any; he knew I needed it, and had decided to inject some cheer into my morning before it soured and took the rest of the day with it.

"You were going to mooch some, I know it," I said. "But thanks for not."

"If you'd looked away I would have," said Cerulean.

No catfish was stolen from anyone on that day, but I cannot guarantee the other days. At any rate, an acidic breakfast had been turned into a sweet one by the efforts of Cerulean, and for that I am grateful.

I still took a moment to grab some shuteye after the history lessons and such. It was drawing nearer evening than noon when I at last had some time to visit Fin again. A new map was strung over the rudimentary mantle, and the one it had replaced was being attended to by none other than the prince himself, his blue-silver eyes shining like a row of pocket-clasps. He was absorbed in his work once more, yet this time he had more awareness of his surroundings, for I had scarce opened my mouth to announce my presence than he remarked on it.

"Riptide, so glad to see you. Come in, come in, make yourself at home."

His excitement turned out to be more fluster than enthusiasm; his face was a ruddy blue and his tail whipped about behind him like a pendulum. He muttered to himself, and I caught the tail end of one of these mumbled sentences.

'He is an oceanographer.'

I pretended not to notice these things.

"Is there anything the matter?" I asked.

"Anything the matter? Why, would you believe this? My mother has sent me a letter. There's some kind of going-on in the kingdom, at The Ridge."

"That sheer cliff?" I asked.

It was one thing to get a letter from any old mother; it was another thing when one's mother was the queen.

"She just said they were having some trouble with the lay of the sea-floor, and she wants me to go check it out."

"Leaving your teaching duties here out in the cold," I said. "If you were going to ask me to take over the position; well, I can't do it; I don't know half as much as you do."

Fin shrugged. "Cerulean knows enough to take over my position if need be."

Cerulean did not seem the kind of dragon to take things seriously at all. Fin must have shared my skepticism.

"Only in a pinch," he said. "But at any rate, I shouldn't mind you going with me."

"Me?" I asked.

"Yes, you," said Fin. "And never mind your studies. Your oceanography doesn't cover what lies past The Ridge, and I have a feeling that once we get done with whatever it is that the locals are having problems, with we can spend a little time to explore."

"They say there's nothing past it but water; it's the edge of the continent, and no sea floor beneath."

Fin shrugged, as if discarding the myths.

"We will only make progress if we can put ourselves in the frame of mind to push past such juvenile superstitions," he said. The words stung. "I know you spent a lot of time in the Bay of Diamonds. It gets fairly deep there in some places, a hundred fathoms even, what with a fathom being six feet. I helped set up the buoy that marks the location of The Ridge on the surface in oh seven; it goes down to a hundred and seventy fathoms even before the drop."

A thousand feet down.

"You didn't remark this yesterday."

"I didn't want to remark on it yesterday," said Fin. "Seawings like water, yes, but there's something in us that doesn't like deep water. How deep does it go? Where's the bottom? I don't like it, and there aren't many who do. If a dragon lives on The Ridge it's usually because he has a good reason to be there, and it usually doesn't involve 'good relations with family' or 'paid down all his debts'. And the pressure, too. There was a dragon who went down to the deepest part of it, didn't replace all the air in his lungs with water when he went down. It was in forty-nine fifty-six or fifty-eight. The air couldn't withstand the water crushing down on him and his chest collapsed and he died."

I pursed my lips.

"It's the closest thing to hell Pyrrhia has," said Fin. "At that depth the only light that seeps down from the surface is blue, and -" he flashed the glowing swirls of scale on his forearms, "the only color that comes from you is blue. Everything is drab and monotone. Dragons who come up from there after a while can't see red for a month. Their ability atrophied. But as you told me yesterday, my sister thinks you're not doing enough brave things. This would be plenty brave."

He paused.

"Are you coming?"

"Yes," I said.

"Good," said Fin. "I'll take the matter to Clay and we'll be out of Jade in a jiffy. And speaking of the Academy, I'm surprised at the lack of tribal violence here. The dragonets of destiny have done a superb job; when they set up this place I thought we'd have young fanatics running around each other's throats because somebody lost his father to somebody else, or a dragoness lost her brother. It should've taken a decade to straighten out."

"Those five can pull off some crazy things."

"Yeah," said Fin. "And if we're traveling together, you'd better start now. Let's go to the headmaster's office and see if Clay's there. I need to announce my leave. From what I know of him he'll be pretty sympathetic."

"He's a nice guy," I said. "Although… barge into his room at your own peril. You might get burned."

Fin stared for a second of incomprehension, the scales above his blue-silver eyes knitted like the threads of new-woven fabric. Then he began to laugh.

"I daresay Peril would have half a mind to give you a good scald if ever she heard your tongue," he said. "Come; let's be on with it, and for moons' sake, don't say anything while you're there."

He arose, pushed past his desk and was out the entrance in a blur, with myself tagging closely behind, half-trotting and half-galloping in the peculiar way Seawings do when they want to get around in a hurry without the luxury of flying or swimming. We had the firm countenances of dragons who are getting something done, and all too easily we slipped through the sparse throng of students, passed the library in a great convulsion, ducked between the displays of the history hall, and so made our way to the working place of the Dragonets of Destiny.

There was a dragon working there, standing in the center of the place. The space at the outer edges of the room was fastidious; the floor around where he was presently surveying scrolls was strewn with paperclips and amulets and Mudwing memorabilia. A friend of his must have come by and cleaned the room, after which Clay had certainly mussed it up again.

It was Clay: there was no mistaking the mahogany scales, gritty and dappled like bark, with specks of gold shining from beneath the gaps in his reptilian coat; nor was there any disguising the scar on his thigh, and the limp which even now saw him balancing higher on his left side than his right.

"Do you mind the intrusion?" asked Fin.

"No, no," said Clay. "Hullo Fin, and hello Riptide."

He glanced up at us and his eyes were tired, more so than mine must have been. His stance was open and inviting; if he was anything like me he had pulled an all-nighter and then attended to his daily work with about three hours of shuteye between, and it was a wonder the tension showed so little. I suddenly felt an intruder in a kindly dragon's life, already overburdened.

"Queen Coral wants me in the Seawing kingdom. I'll be taking leave soon until the affair is cleared up," said Fin.

"Whatever is the matter?"

"She didn't specify, but allowed for some reasonable time to prepare," went on Fin. "Something to do with our deeps out east."

"Clay I -"

Peril turned the corner and I whirled about with an involuntary step away from the door. She had come nowhere near my tail, but it was a habit I'd acquired when she was more reckless, and one I intended to keep, even if I did appreciate her personality. The blue-eyed Skywing spun curlicues of gray smoke in the air about her, and her gaze was as unyielding as the sun.

She was terrifying.

Clay stepped forward and bumped tails with her as if he were brewing tea. He was, however, stuck between addressing his wife and entertaining his guests. A second of silence ensued, until Peril deftly curtsied her head and excused herself to the decidedly nonflammable portions of the room, resolving the awkward moment.

"I can't stop you from leaving," said Clay. "Will you come back to teach after the next harvest time, or do you plan to stay longer in the field?"

"It depends," said Fin. "While I am here, may I ask if I can bring along Riptide? The assignment may be a tad dangerous."

Clay's attention now turned to me in its entirety. There was little sense of being measured here, as with other dragons; he saw me and in an instant took in the whole, without nitpicking about the details.

"Of course," said Clay. "There's no harm in going places and getting into adventures, especially when he's older than I am. Have you got any idea of who's going to replace you?"

"Thank you," said Fin. "Cerulean, I think. My brother hasn't always got his head on straight but there's a great deal of knowledge in it, waiting to be shared."

"Will he be happy with the post?"

Fin chuckled.

"Perhaps not at first, but he'll learn to like it in the end."

"I shall have to give the notice to Starflight, if that's settled," said Clay. "Poor dragon, he always seems to be somber these days. You can stay here at any rate; I've got time."

And Peril gave him a polite death look, for it was obvious that Clay had no time to spare. He was a dragon who thought of other dragons before even himself, and so grew greater.

"I'm sorry, but we're sure you have other things to attend to, and we wouldn't like to take up your afternoon any further than we already have," said Fin. "I'll give my students two weeks to adjust, and then it's off with me. Take care."

"Take care," said Clay, and then we left, to the chatter of Peril remarking 'you wouldn't believe what's in the passageway in castle cross…' as we strode away.

"I think that went quite well, didn't it?" said Fin.

I shrugged.

"I was expecting to go through two layers of bureaucratic onion, and troubles, and them not wanting to let you go, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Clay again, though I daresay Peril gave me a bad fright."

We came out of the interconnected tunnels and treaded the edges of the dining hall. My sharp eyes moved across the room, looking for hint of Cerulean.

"I forget sometimes that you met Clay," said Fin.

"Oh, all of them. What were you doing at the time?"

"Mapping out a backwater island, blissfully unaware of the impending destruction of the summer palace," he said. "It seems the only reason I'm leading you here is because my mother asked for me, and not the one with decent martial skills, for -" he admitted, "I only attended the most basic of training for self defense."

"If anything goes wrong you will very soon be learning some," I said.

"It shouldn't, but at the same time I hope there'll be a smidgeon of action."

A blue scale melted from the crowd, smooth as paint.

"And there's Cerulean," I remarked. "Right as rain."

The Seawing prince slipped through the dragons before him, his presence causing the more aware to slip away before he reached them, like the bow wave of one of those fancy things the coastal Seawings called ships, and I, well. I called them laziness transports.

But there was very little laziness hanging about Cerulean. He saw Fin first, and Fin saw him.

"Hello, prince," they said, each to the other, and broke into infectious smiles, and touched wings one by one, and I looked on until my face was stretched to burst from the grin I'd picked up. When the silliness died away, and the introductions, and the how-do-you-dos and work's-been-greats were all exchanged, Fin gave his brother the long and short of it.

"Mother's calling me back to the Seawing kingdom."

"But not me?" asked Cerulean. He frowned, as if hurt, and then guffawed at my twinge of sympathy. He was faking.

The brothers drifted through the hall, swaying as students passed between them like willow-the-wisps; Cerulean's scales uniform and smooth, with a brass ring upon his foretalon; his counterpart tinged with dark blue where his wings met his shoulders, and adorned with no jewelry. They were rich, and conscientiously so, but compared to Anemone it was a quiet sort of wealth, and not flaunted everywhere with baubles and glistening gels.

"You're too important to go to the Seawing kingdom," said Fin.

It was at this moment that Cerulean suspected.

"Ah, yes. I must remain and continue my unadventurous, mundane studies for the greater good of the royal family. It is my noble duty."

"No," said Fin. "You're teaching my class."

A face of such consternation had not been seen in these mountains since Turtle saw Darkstalker emerge. For a moment Cerulean stopped moving. He bit his lip, swallowed, fidgeted a talon, and managed to say something.

"I see."

"I ought to be back by next year, ought to be."

"Go on."

"And I'm taking Riptide with me."

"That's just unfair."

"Penpals?" I offered. "Although I don't know your address."

Cerulean's pale scales regained an infinitesimally darker hue.

"That would be excellent, thank you. Our friendship is most appreciated. And Fin, you dratted, betraying little backstabber, I daresay I'm cleaning out your office supplies. Before you leave."

And Fin was beside himself with laughter. A few students gave him odd looks, particularly Garnet.

"I'm older than you."

"By five minutes! Bah."

And that was when Sunny ruined all the fun by popping in and asking if we could all be a little bit quieter please; the library was just next door. She was so gentle about it, and unobtrusive, that instead of wanting to claw her head off like I did most interrupters, I was quiescent and yielding.

"She was an agreeable fellow," I said, as the trio of us faded into the tunnels to argue in peace. "It's hard to get mad at her."

"Yeah," said Cerulean. "But Fin – look at him! Look at his smug face and tell me you can't see he's in the wrong."

"I'm not taking sides here," I said. "Just standing aside and watching the sparks fly. You're acting ridiculous enough for that."

A moment while Fin tried not to look self-righteous and Cerulean forced down the annoyance. It had gone from being about the move to scrapping for scrapping's sake.

"You're right," said Cerulean. "I am being hotheaded, and I've lost my princely dignity. At any rate, I'll be glad to usurp my brother's teaching prestige while he goes off into the tail end of nowhere doing who knows what."

"Now hear now hear now," said Fin. "Usurping my students and filling their heads with all sorts of nonsense? Preposterous."

"Better than your brand of teaching. When are you leaving?"

"Two weeks," said Fin.

Two weeks. They could be gone in a flash like spring geese, or bog painfully onwards like molasses; it was hard to envision which. For the first time it dawned on me that I'd have to get my things in order, and personal effects locked away (though no one would ever steal them at Jade, there was always the possibility of them being misplaced in some odd corner by the cleaning crew), and goodbyes said, and waterproof scrolls obtained, along with other supplies for the sojourn.

"It's a tight squeeze, but I can take on the job," said Cerulean, morphing into a mode of all business.

"Despite the multifarious hazards such as sharp pencils, sea monsters on maps, and inquisitive students asking something you hardly knew about from your own education, much less internalized, I think you'll do alright," said Fin. "Not as well as me, but alright."

I shifted left where I stood; the scars across my underbelly were doubling up again, and a twinge of pain reminded me of their presence. There was in those wounds a history which I would rather put behind me.

"So here. Why don't you come by my cave and I'll get you up to speed," said Fin, and Cerulean started to edge back toward the dining hall. "I know the facts are somewhere in that thick head of yours, and have only to be revitalized before you're ready to teach. And no running away, a prince has got to face up to the difficult things, and that includes procrastination."

"So the whole time you've been chatting with Riptide these past few days hasn't been procrastination?" asked Cerulean.

Fin opened his mouth and shut it again. He had been beat, for now.

The weeks flew by after that, at any rate; it felt like hardly hours later that I realized the date of our departure was halfway approached, and though not chubby by even the most stringent measures, I was feeling out of shape. It took some intestinal fortitude to get moving again, but on one morning where the sky was lightly dappled with blue-white haze, and the morning orange and blue had not gone out of the crevices, I had had enough of sitting around looking at charts and soundings, and took to the air. The trees bloomed with lime green and maple leaves, the sweet fragrance of which was lifted ever higher by the updrafts swelling from the heights.

Good cover, the wartime part of my mind remarked. Good cover for an ambush, for the ample brush concealed dragon-scent as well as dragon-scale, and the mountains were never short of caves to hole up in. Scarlet lived here awhile, and she was never found, only showed herself on her terms and occasions. I shivered. Though it remained that she'd come out and got killed, the beautiful scenery was somewhat ruined by thoughts of the war, bogus as they might've been.

Down there in the cavernous deeps, who knew what might lie in wait for a dragon such as myself. There were horror stories of scavengers stabbing dragons to death when they were trapped in the tunnels.

I swung around the outside of Jade Mountain, admiring the peak and the wilds which surrounded it, untouched by all the traffic going to and fro. How empty Pyrrhia was, and how untamed her land was by its putative masters, who owned everything and controlled almost nothing.

I fluttered to rest by a brook in a meadow, hardly the width of my thigh, but burbling and spilling over the rocks and rippling between pebbles in the shallow water-bed, all the while making a quiet trickling I found calming to the ears. It flowed down a narrow gully, which I followed, straddling the ravine where it flowed at times, and cautiously footing the mossy rocks in the water.

At a turn in the stream I stopped dead.

There was a cave, deep and dark and foreboding, and probably slimy and most unpleasant. To go back? The sensible choice, but cowardly. To go sideways? That meant crashing up through the trees. To go forwards? I might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. And as I looked up the slope I could hardly see the disk of the sun above it – mid-morning, and I had an hour to dally.

So I went in, my heart vacillating between chest and throat and my head reminding me that the fear was pure ridiculousness, and meanwhile my poor claws running into snags and stubbing themselves while unsupervised. I stooped, for the ceiling was low, and jagged; not yet taken over by stalactites, though creepers had already run up the sides of the entrance and coated it in leaves of vibrant green, pleasing to the eye. Seawings could see well in the dark, better than other tribes, and I could see the cave tunneling on and rounding a corner and disappearing into unknown depths; still, it took a minute of peering cautiously into the gloom before I saw the details appear, gradually melting out of the shadows in some instances and in other places being noticed all at once.

This was not an old cave, or if it was it'd probably shifted and been blocked by Darkstalker's earthquake when he rose out of the mountain fells and brought much evil. Again I hesitated; again I badgered my legs onwards. A spider skittered away from my footsteps; already their kind had taken over the upper reaches with cobwebs, glistening with dew which caught the light from the entrance and magnified it fourfold, until the beads of water seemed glistening gems. Further on I saw a piece of detritus, washed in by summer floods, stepped over it.

I was calmer than when I had come here, more focused; the details caught my eyes one-by-one and I examined them; a shelf in the rock; the way the stream washed down and spilled over the lip of a tiny waterfall; the small footprints in the bit of mud by the brook, without toes or soles or claws, and perhaps the size of my forefinger.

I chuckled, a little chortle that reverberated in the tunnel from top to bottom, end to entrance, and came back a booming, ominous laugh. There was an 'eep' in the dark, and then a 'ssh', and the scuttling of tiny feet. In the dark there was nothing but scavengers; little two-legged things which arranged their lives around every dragons every step; our schedules and our habits. Feeling confident enough without pushing things, I quested with my nose, establishing the scent, then turned about and (not without a last look over my shoulder) went back up to the entrance. If I had an hour more to spend, or two, or a day, it would be beyond excellent, but as it was I had duties and classes and all sorts of civilized blah.

It made one think that the natural state of the wild was as good as cultivated life, or better.

At any rate, as I flew up the flank of the mountain and came nearer the dais which led into Jade, my mind was concluded; there was nothing in the dark save those who feared me.

Cerulean was there, and from his position two propositions could be drawn about where Fin was; either Fin was close by or he was on the other side of the mountain, recuperating from another of their brotherly quarrels.

But more interesting to me than any of that was Tsunami. She was looking out over the mountains; two hundred miles east could one see from here; the mountain ranges and the end of their slopes, and far, far beyond, the rolling plains. Skywings told me it was even better the way they saw it. Despite taking in the open air, she was transparently self-absorbed, for she'd missed me swinging by, and it was only now that I'd set down on the smooth, populated shelf that her eyes transposed from looking inwards to looking outwards.

Was she cold; ambivalent; welcoming? Her stance betrayed little.

"Good luck on that trip of yours," she said, then, calling up a reserve of the fire which governed her in the younger days: "Don't dare die."

So she still liked me, to some degree.

"There's nothing to be afraid of in the dark," I said, and I tapped a horn. "It's all in your head."

"Perhaps I am, too."

A chortle.

"I'll see you when you get back."

"The same," I said.

And there the short, terse conversation ended. Whether she liked me more or less, or whither her intentions lay with me, could not easily have been discerned. Trying to pick information out of these things was as much guessing as inference.

I trotted to Cerulean, who was looking on with some curiosity.

"Sis isn't too impressed with you," he said, and then, at the startled look which must've overcome my face, "The musty cave scent didn't help much."

"What for? She didn't like me being in the Talons of Peace and now she doesn't like me being with the Kingdom," I said. "She caught wind of me going to The Ridge somehow."

"You lost sis's respect, and that'll take a while to get back, and you're associated with Mom, which doesn't help either," said Cerulean, appraising me with a long eye. "Not that there's anything wrong with you, but she's got to respect somebody before she talks to 'em much. I bet her managing Jade is driving her nuts, and you being here is driving her even more nuts. You being gone for a while will let her think things through."

He looked around.

"And if you thought it wouldn't get out to the masses, think again. The young students will be leaning over their benches with conspiratorial grins talking about you. The young dragons want to do 'what Riptide does' and half the dragonesses have had an infatuation with ya' one time or another."

"No."

"Yes! Expect to bump into the tail end of your own rumor before long."

We went on talking about trivial things awhile after that, but I had a sinking feeling in my intestines about what Cerulean had said. It very quickly turned out that he was not wrong. Hardly had we parted ways, myself to my studies, Cerulean to learning to teach them – hardly had I started down the entrance corridor than I heard a chattering winglet coming down the hall with Tsunami's name being tossed around like a pig bladder balloon, and I stopped dead in my tracks like I had in the cave.

"I saw her on the balcony this morning just an hour ago, talking to that Talons of Peace dragon."

"Webs's son."

"Webs's son. She didn't look too impressed with him, the poor dear."

When I had had enough of it I walked briskly out where they were talking, trotted past without so much as taking notice of their presence, and sped onwards with their gazes fixed solidly on my back. That shut them up for a second, until I was gone and the gossip began all over again. It was hopeless. The rope had been prepared in the court of public opinion and the courtroom was determining to hang me with it. As my friend had intoned, perhaps it was best for me to be gone for a while and let the chaff blow where the wind willed.

So it was that when the weeks were up and it was the morning of our departure I had sealed everything I needed in a pouch. There were tourniquets, in case one of us bashed a rock and bled; scrolls and a water-quill for writing Cerulean; a notebook, several maps, and the usual surveyor's odds and ends; a thermometer and some blank charts; a special plumb line and a fathom cable slung over my back. As travel readiness goes, I was well prepared for the sojourn.

The path to Fin's cave I knew so well I could've gone there with my eyes closed and my claws navigating by feel on the wall, as Tamarin used to do, before she died. I knew Fin's hours and also that he'd be waiting for me – if he had not gone looking for me himself, which would have been humorous. But I heard low talking as I came nearer the archway into his place, and, figuring he'd be glad to see me on any account, slipped quietly inside and by the sleeping shelf and waited for an opening in the conversation.

"Tuesday class is early, before the histories, right?" asked Cerulean.

"And watch out for Garnet, too; he's gotten in the habit of being a late riser, and he's even more in the habit of being grumpy when he comes in. All the Skywings are reticent when it comes to cartography. They think they know everything about the world, having seen it from the top, ha," said Fin. "Hello Riptide."

I wagged my ears to introduce myself.

"Then I've got a day to organize things before Thursday," said Cerulean.

"And do your own classwork," said Fin. "Unlike myself, you have tutors, since you're younger than I and Mother thinks you need such things."

"Five minutes," said Cerulean. "Five minutes and I'd be the oldest of the clutch."

"There are some things that can't be changed," said Fin. "We've been having this argument for years. I suggest you get over it."

"If only I hadn't been so cozy in that egg…"

Fin laughed.

"I think you've got your head on straight," said he. "I hope when I get back there won't be any complaints."

"I am a worthy teacher."

"There's an optional class today, remember? So you'd better get cracking."

Cerulean's face screwed up almost as much as it had when Fin told him he was teaching the course.

"And with you so eager to do the job, I'd best turn to Riptide, since he's looking rather neglected in that corner over there. Ready to get going, chap?"

I nodded, and Fin, who already had attached to himself a similar pouch I heretofore had missed, went and got the rest of his things.

"I can't believe it, I can't believe it," said Cerulean. "Me stuck here tutoring a course while you get to go off on adventures and fight things in the dark with my conniving older brother."

It was hard not to feel some sympathy for him.

"You'll be fine," I said. "And I'll be writing. I think the post on The Ridge goes out once a fortnight."

"How comforting," said Cerulean, but his snout lost the tension at the jaws. "Good luck then."

"I shall use it," I said. "There's nothing to fear in the dark."