Chapter 21 - Part 7

“It sounds like we are abandoning Meschashmal,” grumbled a young brass dragon. He was smoking a pipe the size of a horse. It was an affection of his that was quite recent, maybe only twenty years old.

“Meschashmal is dead,” snorted an angry gold. The gold dragon was not much older than her brass-colored co-conspirator, but she had been angry most of her life. “We ought to be thinking of revenge! Death! Retribution!”

“You forget the bigger picture, darling,” said a young male green who had been pursuing the gold for a century. She still hadn’t mated with him yet. “We need to thwart the Lords of Dust as they plan so that the Prophecy will not be marred.”

“Don’t patronize me!” the gold snapped.

“Calm down, all of you,” said a crusty copper with an abundance of chin whiskers. With Meschashmal dead he was the oldest member of the Chamber living. “We can do nothing about Meschashmal, but we can protect the Prophecy, which I may add Meschashmal gave his life for.”

“Distracting the fiends so the three can sneak into their city,” the brass said, taking another puff. “Impressive. They will die of course.”

“They are four,” snapped the gold. “And I care not a whit that they die, but I do care that they are supposed to deliver the riddle and they cannot.”

A crystal hummed in the center of the rocky glade where they were meeting, and the copper directed a mental nudge at it. “Yes?” he asked.

“An interesting alignment of the planes has occurred,” came the tinny voice on the other end that was in reality an extremely large red who studied patterns of magma inside a volcano that housed a planar vortex. “The ship is moving. The four may be part of it, but they will again become three.”

“What does that mean?” the brass dragon asked, pushing his pipe to the side.

“It means that this isn’t over,” sneered the gold. “What we need to do is decide what to do about it.”

The green frowned, the exhaled a bit. “Our only choice is the druid,” he said. “We may not like working with her, but she can accelerate the weather there.”

No one spoke for a while. The white dragon druid was extremely difficult to work with, and as she was not a member of the Chamber, she charged a high price for her silence.

“Do it,” the copper said finally. “We don’t have a choice.”