Dracoveth did not sleep.
It did not need to. The realm breathed on its own rhythm, older than any schedule, older than the concept of night and day as the humans below understood them. The Goldwood to the north rustled with wind that had no source. The Velaren Sea moved in the west with the particular patience of something that had never once been in a hurry. The volcanic plains where Kaldris kept his palace glowed faintly at the horizon, steady and permanent, like a reminder that some things simply refused to go out.
Aeldrath stood at the open edge of the throne room and watched his realm breathe.
The Throne of the First sat behind him. He was not sitting in it. He rarely sat in it when he was alone. The throne was a performance piece as much as anything else, a symbol the court needed to see occupied occasionally, a reminder of what he was and what that meant to everyone around him. When no one was watching there was no particular reason to perform.
He looked out at Aelveth instead. The capital arranged itself below the palace in tiers of dark stone and gold veining, torchlight moving through the streets where dragon-shifters who preferred the night hours moved about their business. From up here they were small. Everything was small from up here.
He had not always found that comforting.
"You came back early."
He did not turn around. He had heard Kaldris approaching from three corridors away, the specific weight of his brother's footsteps something he had memorized across centuries without trying. Kaldris moved like something that was always one degree away from combustion. Even his walk had heat in it.
"I was not aware I had announced a return time," Aeldrath said.
"You did not announce a departure time either." Kaldris came to stand beside him at the open edge, close enough that Aeldrath could feel the warmth radiating off him. His brother ran several degrees hotter than anything else alive. He always had. "You simply disappeared. Again."
"I am the king. I do not disappear. I am elsewhere."
"For four days."
"Kings are permitted to be elsewhere for four days, Kaldris."
His brother was quiet for a moment. That was never a good sign. Kaldris without words was Kaldris gathering them, selecting the ones most likely to find a gap in whatever armor was being worn.
"Selvara again," he said. Not a question.
Aeldrath said nothing.
"You have been descending to that city more in the past three weeks than in the past three decades." Kaldris turned to look at him. Aeldrath could feel the weight of it without turning back. "I am not complaining. I am observing."
"Observe quietly."
"That has never been my strength and you know it." A pause. Then, with the specific precision of someone placing something carefully, "Vaethor has noticed too."
Now Aeldrath turned. Not because the mention of Vaethor alarmed him, but because his brother's expression was worth reading directly. Kaldris looked the way he always looked. Sharp and burning and constitutionally incapable of patience. But underneath it, something else. Something that in a less volatile creature might have been concern.
"Vaethor notices everything," Aeldrath said. "It is what I keep him for."
"Then perhaps you should speak with him before he comes to you." Kaldris held his gaze for a moment and then looked back out at the city. The faint glow of his element moved under his skin at his jaw, the way it always did when he was restraining something. "I am not asking what you do down there. I am not asking anything. I am simply telling you that people are paying attention."
"People always pay attention to what a king does."
"People always pay attention," Kaldris agreed. "But they talk when the pattern changes."
He left after that. No argument, no escalation, which was somehow more unsettling than his usual methods. Kaldris leaving a conversation quietly meant he had said everything he intended to say and was content to let it land in his own time.
Aeldrath turned back to the open air.
Across the realm Nylara's sea moved in the dark, silver and deep and unhurried. She had not come to him tonight. She had not said anything in days, which with Nylara meant she was watching something develop with the patience of someone who had already decided how she felt about it and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.
He found that more irritating than Kaldris's directness.
He thought about Selvara. The harbor lights. The way the city looked from the street level rather than from the air, which was a different thing entirely, smaller and warmer and full of the specific texture of human life in all its brief and complicated detail.
He thought about the temple. About standing at the edge of the steps in the dark and watching a woman leave an offering on the shelf with the careful attention of someone doing something private and real. Not performance. Not the elaborate public devotion he was accustomed to. Just a piece of amber placed gently among other small sincere things.
He had watched her for several minutes before he spoke. He had not intended to speak at all.
She had looked up at his temple with an expression he did not have an immediate name for. He had catalogued human expressions for centuries. Joy and grief and hunger and boredom and the specific exhaustion of people carrying things they had never chosen to carry. He knew all of them. He could read a human face the way scholars read texts, efficiently and without particular emotion.
Her expression had not been any of those things.
Or rather it had been several of them at once, layered in a way that was difficult to separate. There was longing in it. There was also something quieter and more durable underneath the longing, something that had been there long enough to stop being painful and become simply true. The expression of someone who had been waiting for a very long time and had made a kind of peace with the waiting without giving up the thing they were waiting for.
He had seen humans pray to him for decades. For centuries. He had heard every word ever directed at that temple, every whispered petition, every desperate and grateful and furious thing people brought to the gold stone in the dark.
Nobody had ever looked at it like that.
He had spoken before he made the decision to speak. That was unusual. He made decisions before actions. He had done so for as long as he could remember. It was simply how he functioned.
She had startled. Pressed her hand to her chest. Looked at him with eyes that were direct in a way people's eyes generally were not when they looked in his direction, even when they did not know what he was. Something in him registered even in human form. People felt it. They could not name it but they felt it and it made them perform, made them careful, made them arrange themselves into whatever version of themselves they thought was most acceptable.
She had looked at him like he was simply a person who had startled her on temple steps.
"You scared me", she had said. Plainly. Without apology or arrangement.
He had apologized. He could not remember the last time he had apologized for anything.
She had asked if he came here often and then looked immediately as though she regretted the phrasing, a small crease of self-directed amusement moving across her face, and that expression had been the most human thing he had witnessed in longer than he could accurately calculate.
He had walked back to the edge of the city afterward and shifted and risen into the night air above Selvara and told himself, with the absolute authority of something that had been certain of everything for centuries, that it was nothing. A moment. An interesting human in a city full of humans. He had seen interesting humans before.
He had descended again the next morning.
"My lord."
Vaethor's voice came from the corridor behind him. Quiet and even, the way everything about Vaethor was quiet and even, the particular stillness of something ancient enough to have stopped being impressed by urgency.
Aeldrath did not turn around immediately. "You could simply say my name."
"I could," Vaethor agreed, coming to stand beside him. He was not tall, which had always been slightly incongruous given what he was. In human form he looked like someone's grandfather, white haired and unhurried, with eyes that had seen enough of everything to have stopped reacting to most of it. "You came back earlier than expected."
"Kaldris has already made that observation."
"Kaldris makes most observations eventually. He is simply loud about them." Vaethor looked out at Aelveth with the expression of someone who had looked at it ten thousand times and still found it worth looking at. "I am not here about your schedule."
"Then what are you here about?"
Vaethor was quiet for a moment. The Goldwood rustled to the north. Somewhere in the city below a dragon-shifter laughed at something, the sound carrying up on the still air.
"There is a feeling," Vaethor said finally, "that comes before things change. I have felt it enough times to recognize it." He paused. "I felt it tonight."
Aeldrath looked at him. Vaethor looked back with the calm of someone who had already decided to say what he came to say and was not going to be redirected.
"I am going back to Selvara tomorrow," Aeldrath said.
"I know," said Vaethor.
Neither of them said anything after that. They stood at the open edge of the throne room and watched the realm breathe below them, gold veined stone and ancient dark water and the faint persistent glow at the horizon where fire lived, and the night moved around them the way it always had.
The way it would not, Vaethor suspected, for very much longer.