“What are you doing?”
“Going to get the dragons!”
“How do you plan on doing that?”
“Same way I got Zero. By showing my face, letting them get all snarly. The difference here is that they’re not fourteen-year-old little shits. They’ll see I’m a twink, and since they’re lesbians, they’ll love me and… wow. I really didn’t think that plan through, oh my gods. Why were you going to let me go through with this?”
“If only you’d had that realization years ago, one wonders where you might be. And I wasn’t letting you do anything. You were the one who was trying to sneak out of the castle!”
“You’re my elder,” I insisted. “You should know better than to enable me. Good job on that one. Just… let me think. For a moment.”
“I suppose there’s a first time for everything,” Randall muttered under his breath.
The plateau was larger than I expected it to be. The mountain still rose high above us, disappearing into the clouds, but the section we stood upon looked as if it had been carved into the side of the mountain. And given that I still knew absolutely nothing about dragons, even though I technically lived with one (though, in my defense, Kevin was the absolute worst dragon ever), I didn’t know if it was natural or if it had been… done. By something large.
The entrance to the cave itself looked as if Castle Freesias could have sat inside it with the topmost tower clearing the ceiling of the cave. And that… well. That certainly didn’t put me at ease.
“You said you’ve seen them,” I said, not looking away from the cave, the whispers in my head getting louder.
“I have,” Randall said.
“Are they… big?”
“They’re dragons.”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Any chance you’ll tell me why you were called Randall of Dragons?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not here. Not for this.”
“Yeah,” I breathed out. “Right.” I scrubbed my hand over my face. “So, Kevin is of the four-legged variety. Zero was a snake dragon monster thing. What kind of dragons am I looking at here? You gotta give me something.”
“They’re… feathered.”
“Feathered,” I said flatly. “That’s what you’re going with.”
He shrugged. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought he was having the time of his life. But he couldn’t have been that stupid, right?
“Like… birds?”
“Very large birds, yes.”
“Oh my gods. Why are you like this?”
He smiled. “This is your destiny, Sam. I’m just along for the ride.”
Since I figured murdering him was out of the question, I decided to go in a different direction. “Okay, so here’s the plan.”
“I wait with bated breath.”
“Stop trying to be funny!”
“I cannot stop what comes naturally.”
“Gaaah! Okay! Here’s the plan. We are going to walk to the cave entrance. We are going to announce our presence. And then we are going to ask the dragons to come out and we’ll have a nice conversation. They’ll see what a good guy I am, and undoubtedly, since he’s an absolute dick, the star dragon will have already told them I would be coming. Hell, he probably told them a million years ago. There! See? It’s foolproof.”
“I often find that only fools see things as foolproof.”
I had a brief fantasy of him tumbling head over heels after I pushed him over the side of the mountain. “This wil