Zan finds a pair of slippers for me in my bedroom. They won't hold up well to hiking through a forest, but he assures me we can acquire boots in Crystal Hollow for the return trip.
But Zan pauses after closing the door behind us, considering it with a frown. "I think youâwe will need a lock," he finally says. "It was never a problem before, since almost no one could come up here. And it was a signal that anyone who could was welcome. But now..."
Now, anyone can come up here.
Now, there's no safe places for sages.
"Not a sanctuary anymore," I murmur.
Zan looks at me sharply. "For now, it can be your sanctuary. We'll just put up a boundary that you don't have to actively maintain."
What about other sages, though?
I look toward the temple. Its doors are open again.
"Hmm," Zan says thoughtfully, following my gaze.
I turn away. I don't want to give the priesthood more reasons to target me.
I sacrificed five hundred years because of them. Whatever I may have deserved for what I've done, I don't believe I owe more than that.
And I don't know what else I could do, even if I wanted to.
Establishing a region safe from the priesthood's magic demonstrably wasn't enough, after all.
I walk toward the path down the mountain, and Zan follows without a word.
The sun shines on my face, and not because I've been taken to a battlefield. The slippers are soft but unfamiliar on my feet. There are flowers blooming all around me, close enough to touch, wild and free.
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I don't know this world, how to make sense of it.
"Do you know the names of the birds?" I ask Zan.
"It's hard for a dragon to get close to birds," he says with a touch of humor, and maybe a touch of sadness. "But I can tell you about the trees."
We've reached the path from the clearing where the flowers grow to the edge of the forest. "Why didn't trees swallow up the temple grounds? Flowers still grow, so it can't have been my magic."
"It's my landing pad in dragon form," Zan explains. "High enough in the sky, there needs to be a wide opening or you miss it. Are you ready?"
To leave the place where I have been trapped for five hundred years?
Or to leave the place where I claimed my power for myself?
"No," I say, and start down the path anyway.
It's narrower than it used to be, but then, no one is marching cohorts of priests and enough supplies for all the temple's residents up and down its trails anymore.
Zan keeps pace with me. "It's spring, so there's a lot in bloom right now. I'm happy to teach you what I know, but there are going to be lots of new things for you today. Would you like to know about the trees first, or Crystal Hollow? It's changed a lot since your time, but I can give you a tourâ"
"Why do you know Crystal Hollow well?" I interrupt.
He pauses, glancing at me like he's not sure how to answer this question. "It's the only place in the empire I can interact with people without having to worry about the priesthood."
"But why are you still here at all?" I press. "After all this time, why haven't you left Kameya? Or returned to the dragons? I obviously don't know dragon culture well, but from what I remember dragons don't stay in one place for even a generationâand that's without being specifically targeted."
"Rather than merely generally targeted?" Zan returns with false lightness.
Even in my time, the dragons were one of the main tools the priesthood used to justify their existence. By making dragons into a public enemyâfocusing on dragons' supposed greed in their unwillingness to share the excessive magical wealth that they can't even fully use, and in so doing distracting from the priesthood's wealthâand moreover making them into an enemy that a normal person couldn't easily defeat, dragons became a convenient deflection, the "real" problem.
"You know what I mean," I say. "There's a difference between general bigotry, which is obviously bad, and the powers that be developing policies to entrap you specifically."
"I notice," Zan says, still in that light voice, "that you're not addressing the matter of stealing children."