The camp settled into the particular silence of people who had survived something and weren't sure what came next.

Cirillian took the first watch.

The fire had burned down to a sullen orange glow, throwing just enough light to make the dark past its edges feel deeper by comparison. They sat with the kind of stillness that wasn't restful, turning things over in their mind the way their fingers turned a dagger hilt, over and under, over and under, the weight of it a constant.

Motte. How well did they actually know her? Well enough to have marched into a swamp beside her. Well enough to feel the absence of her like a stone in a boot. Beyond that, the honest answer sat uncomfortably.

Tyrion was another matter. Nobody survived encasement in amber. That was not a thing that happened to people and left them standing upright, golden-eyed and faintly bewildered, in a cave outside Iron River. And yet the world had a long history of not caring what was and wasn't survivable, and Tyrion was standing proof of it. The tall dark figure sleeping a few feet away was another kind of proof entirely.

Cirillian's gaze drifted, as it kept doing, to the low embers.

They were still watching the coals when something caught at the edge of their vision. A flash of black scales, a void pressed against the stars, and then nothing. Stars. Just stars, as if they'd always been there and nothing had moved between them at all.

Cirillian sat very still for a moment.

Bards, they thought, have a thousand and one stories about dragons. Cackling barroom tales, epic ballads, fragments of history so old the facts had been worn smooth. But in all the years of listening, Cirillian had never met a single person who had actually seen one. The closest candidate was somewhere ahead of them, in a city whose silence had never been adequately accounted for.

They drew their Dragon Heart Crystal from where it rested against their skin.

It came warm already, warmer than skin alone could account for, warmer in a way that felt less like retained heat and more like something produced from within. Almost humid, if that word could apply to a crystal. They rolled it slowly between their fingers, and the dark facets caught the firelight and held it differently than stone should.

The facets reminded them of something. A market stall, long ago, in the Free City of Draden. A merchant with fast hands and a persuasive mouth, trying to move something similar. But that one had felt inert. A pretty rock with pretensions. This was different. This felt like something that had opinions.

The sense of obligation that settled over Cirillian as they held it was not entirely comfortable. It was a familiar shape, that feeling, the shape of a debt not yet called in, or a promise made on behalf of someone who hadn't agreed to the terms.

Tuathe O' De`Dadan. The name drifted up from memory, unbidden.

Cirillian put the crystal away and turned back toward the fire.

Something caught at the edge of their vision: a small, cold gleam in the grass beyond the firelight. Dagger out, they moved toward it. As they closed the distance, a faint dark-edged light bled through the fabric of their coat, their own crystal reacting to something, and on the ground ahead, in its illumination, a silvery white glow.

A torn cord. A makeshift pouch, three-quarters intact.

The light faded the moment Cirillian lifted the pouch clear of the grass.

Motte's Dragon Heart Crystal. They knew it the way you know something without being able to say how: the weight, the particular quality of the light it had thrown before going dark in their hand.