They waited out the roost in the drowned hollow beneath the pool.
For the better part of a day, the dragons circled the water above, screaming and scorching the surface, unable to understand where their prey had gone. And for that whole day the family rested in the dark air pocket among the great roots, catching their breath, tending the last of their hurts, and taking quiet stock of what they had done.
Five Longhorn Dragons. Not four. They had the horns and the hearts and the hides of all five, taken clean before the wider roost had ever answered the fifth one's dying call.
The task the Shrine had set them was finished. What had chased them into the water was not the task at all, only the countless other dragons the Shrine had never counted, drawn down out of the high clouds by the death-cries of their kin.
