When Ice Breaks, When Gold Cracks

Foliis's wing of the temple was on the far side of the courtyard, connected to the throne room where the scrying pool was through a series of long hallways. Unda passed the glass door to her elaborate greenhouse, glowing with warm sunlight that made the lush growth even more green and striking. He skirted acolytes racing past him with their arms full of books and their faces frozen in anxious glares. When visitors graced the halls, the temple buzzed like a hive and the servants couldn't seem to find a moment to breathe. It only solidified the weight hanging over him. Biting the inside of his cheek, he lifted his chin and quickened his steps.

Polished white stone walls covered with colorful tapestries blurred around him as he ran. The soles of his laced boots clapped against the marble floors, an erratic rhythm that slowed as he broke through the final corridor and stepped out into the huge rotunda where Selini sprawled atop a giant platform, a lowly throne for a dragon goddess. Today, she had taken her proper dragon form, a formidable beast with a sturdy body of hard, multicolored scales and five heads, each a different color to represent five parts of the whole goddess: gold in the center, surrounded by black and green, and red and blue on the ends. Carved columns of white stone surrounded the room, lifting the domed ceiling high above the goddess's five heads so that she could stretch her necks fully. Her scales glittered like polished gems, and her five crowns of varied horns gleamed where the light kissed them.

At her massive talons was the little scrying pool where the military and political leaders had gathered in their thick fur cloaks. With their broad shoulders and toned bodies, the dragonborn towered over Unda, but they were nothing more than ants to the goddess.

"Unda." The goddess's blue head looked his way, her five voices speaking in unison. The other four heads lifted, their gazes a mixture of sharp and curious. The blue one stretched toward him, a gentle purr rumbling in her throat as the beams of light slid across her cobalt scales. Her face was sturdy and square, framed by a modest set of spikes around the jaw that pointed up to her thick, pale blue horns. Her eyes were the softest, and they carried a hint of a smile.

"Come sit," the blue head, Coae, said alone like the whisper of the tides pulling back from the shore.

"Yes, goddess." Unda straightened his sash one more time, cringing as the brush of his hand only wrinkled it more, and stepped onto the mosaic tiles. Selini's image covered the floor, and her five heads watched him both above and below as he crossed the rotunda.

Medals clinked as the leaders parted like waves, opening a path to the small scrying pool set deep into the floor. Crystal clear water sat perfectly still in the bowl; cerulean tiles lined the bottom, and their brilliance gave the water a slight blue tint. Cold eyes bored into his back as he knelt beside the pool. He glanced around at the faces of the dragonborn around him. Many of them boasted scars that proudly showed how many battles they had fought and won, and some were even missing scales or the tip of their horns.

An old dragonborn cloaked in deep red leaned in to the man next to him. "Where are the others?" he whispered, so quiet Unda would have missed it if not for his sensitive ears. "The Blue Head Dragonborn is just a kid—he's nothing but skin and bones. We need to speak to a real disciple if we want to make any progress on this."

Unda sucked in a sharp breath, forcing back the tug of anxiety. "The others will be here shortly," he said. "I was told that you wished to speak with me about an important matter."

The two straightened, jaws set and eyes narrowed—their pupils narrow slits that betrayed the venom on their tongues kept sealed behind their lips.

One of the younger dragonborn, a man with scales that shifted colors as his expression changed who kept his hair slicked back in a low ponytail hidden beneath his thick fur cloak, dipped his head in a tiny polite nod. "Head Dragonborn," he said in a rough voice like the scrape of gravel, "there is movement in our colonies on the edges of Calistie. We have reason to suspect the elves are mounting a resistance."