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Chapter 17

Thorolos paced his room. The icy blue floor was marred with scratches where his serrated claws had dug in to keep him from slipping. The walls had stopped weeping while he was... in that prison. During the warmer months, the walls and floors melted slightly, so scratches refroze with fresh water. Now, the signs of his agitation were permanently engraved in the walls and floor. Well, at least until some servant came to fill them.

His room was bare. A rough hole of ice. A few shelves of stone tablets to write orders for the servants on set into the walls. His accommodations had never been extravagant, but he used to think that they were cozy. Now, they reminded him of his cell. Well, at least he didn't have anything to miss if he were to be... relocated, to put it lightly.

The two day flight back to the Glaciaren palace had passed in silence. After they had landed, his father had ordered him straight to his room, to await his summons. Thorolos knew he had made his final mistake. He had always been his father's least favorite child. He was never big enough, never regal enough, never strong enough, never smart enough. Never brave enough. His foray into the south was supposed to prove his bravery to his father. To make him proud. But, after the trouble it put his father through, he feared he wouldn't survive his summons.

A servant peeked through his doorway expectantly.

Thorolos felt his feet grow cold. He walked numbly out of his room, following the servant. The servant led Thorolos out of the dormitory where him and his siblings slept. It was currently deserted. Even though he knew the castle by heart, he still let the servant lead him through the passages that led to the throne room. The servant was completely silent. The only sound either of them made was the light tapping of Thorolos' claws on the ice of the hallway. The soft tap tap tap echoed through the long, bare tunnels.

The hallways all throughout the castle were designed to be confusing. Dead ends, circles, miles of tunnels leading every which way, and only one path to the throne room. When he was younger, he used to explore them. Getting lost was both terrifying and exciting. Who knew what was hidden inside the labyrinth of ice? Thorolos knew. It was mostly just more ice.

The hall they were in suddenly widened into a massive, arched room. The throne room was plenty large enough for several hundred dragons to be audience to anything the King wished, but the only event the King thought was important enough to have in the throne room were challenges. Fights between the King and, normally, one of his sons. Even then, only a few of the Glaciaren gentry were allowed to attend.

Massive windows of ice lined the walls, looking out over the palace grounds and the snowfields beyond. The floor was pristine, with not a scratch in it. The King's clawless servants, among their many other jobs, kept the palace immaculate. It was a thankless, despised job, not in the least because it involved your claws being torn out.

The Glaciaren throne was sharp, jagged, enormous. Countless rulers had sat atop it, and it had been molded in some way by each one. When he was much younger, Thorolos used to dream of one day adding his own touch to the throne. A silly dream. He would never have been king. He had far too many older siblings standing in line for the throne. Two of them stood sentry on either side of the King, who sat upon the throne, looking down the hall at Thorolos. The King pinned Thorolos with his gaze. Thorolos knew he should step forward. The servant bowed out of the way, darting down a small servant's corridor. Thorolos looked at the corridor, tempted. Who knew the tunnels better than him? While his siblings were studying, fighting, learning, becoming better candidates for the throne, he was exploring the many passageways of the castle. He could get away, he was sure of it. And then... and then what?

Before he could decide, the King beckoned him forward with the smallest twitch of his tail. It was too late. The King did not ask twice.

Thorolos felt clumsy as he walked down the length of the throne room. Even though only three dragons watched him, he felt as if the entire palace was inspecting him, judging him, picking him apart. He reached the throne and bowed low, wings folded, paws crossed, tail tucked. He waited for his father to tell him to stand, to relax. The command never came. He held his bow, face gradually growing hotter. He daren't rise.

"Thorolos," the King said. He sounded tired. "You have been a disappointment since your birth. A shame. Your mother was exceptional, but I suppose competence isn't genetic."

Thorolos cringed, shrinking further into his bow. The King was silent. Waiting, he realized. Thorolos racked his mind for something to say, but he couldn't think. Images of possible punishments crowded any other thought from his head.

"What, nothing to say? No defence? No words?"

Thorolos remained silent. He berated himself. Say something. Anything!

"Hmph. I expected as much. You are not worthy to be called my son. However, much as I regret it, you are still of my blood. As such, I will give you a choice. Leave the palace, now, and never return, or become a servant. Might actually do the palace some good that way. Your choice."

Thorolos was shocked. Being given a choice was a surprise, but it was no choice at all. His joint wasn't close to being healed, so leaving the palace would be a death sentence. He hadn't expected his father to condemn him to the lowest rung of Glaciaren society. A small glance at his father's face told him that he expected an answer now.

"...S-servant," he managed to choke out. The King beckoned his siblings forward. They looked at him piteously. His sister grabbed one of his paws and held it out towards his brother. Thorolos' eyes widened in fear. He knew that becoming a servant would mean having his claws removed, but he hadn't thought that the King would have them removed here, in the throne room, by his siblings.

His brother grabbed a claw with his own. Thorolos tried to pull away, but his siblings were much older, and stronger, than he was. His brother closed his eyes and pulled. Thorolos felt his claw hold on for a moment before being torn free. He squeezed his eyes shut and grit his teeth, determined not to give the King the satisfaction of hearing him scream. He heard a small hiss, and an even sharper pain shot through his finger where his claw had been. He had seen the process before, at a distance. They removed the claws, then froze the tips of the toes to ensure that the claws didn't grow back. His siblings made quick work of it, at least. Soon, a neat pile of twenty claws sat before him. His paws were burning, and the hard ice of the palace floor didn't help.

"You know the way through the tunnels. Go find the servant dormitories and make yourself useful. Oh, and send somebody to clean this up," the King said.

Chapter 18

Thorolos walked through the halls gingerly, trying and failing to favor all of his paws at once. He had stumbled to the corridor the servant had left through and slipped through it. During his childhood expeditions, he had never paid much mind to the servant corridors that webbed the castle. He hadn't wanted to see any more of the servants than absolutely necessary. They had always made him uncomfortable.

To his dismay, the winding corridors were far more complex than he assumed they'd be. Every cramped hallway looked identical to the next. They split time and time again, with no way to keep track of which path led where. Each wall was marred with scratches, like a dragon had held out their claw while walking past. He assumed the servants had more important ice to keep pretty.

He wandered the corridors aimlessly, hoping to find a servant to follow back to the dormitories. Every time a hallway opened into a room, he got a better idea of where he was. Of course, he had no idea where the servant's dormitories could be. Right after stumbling away from the royal kitchen he used to steal food from when he was barely more than a hatchling, he saw a deep blue blur cross an intersection not far from him.

"Hey! Wait!" Thorolos called after the dragon as he limped to the corridor the servant had run down. The dragon looked back towards him. "Help me. I need to find the servant's quarters."

The dragon's mouth curled in contempt. "What would you want..." the dragon started before he saw the way Thorolos was standing. His face softened a bit seeing Thorolos' lack of claws.

"Sorry. They're this way," the dragon said. He led Thorolos through corridor after corridor. Finally, the hall led into a long, short room. Unlike the halls they had been walking through, the dormitories were stone. Small niches were carved into the walls at regular intervals. Most of them were empty, but several were occupied by Glaciaren servants. At the very end of the dormitory, light poured out of a small doorway.

"Synarth is in there. She'll get you started," the blue dragon said, before running back out of the dormitory. The soft pat pat of his paws grew quieter before disappearing altogether.

Thorolos made his way towards the end of the dormitory. It was bare and cold, but not impersonal. Each niche was slightly different. He saw one with a pair of dragons sleeping on top of each other within. He hurried to the end of the dormitories and peeked through the doorway.

A massive, square room opened before him. The doorway he was looking through led out into open air. He craned his head up. There were more doorways identical to the one he was looking through opening up into the square room. Across from him, a dragon hopped out of one of the highest layers and glided to the bottom of the room. In the center, a small, sky blue Glaciaren whirled around a huge ring of stone, grabbing more of the small stone slabs from shelves beneath the desk. A hole leading up to the open sky lit the large, square room, and a rectangular ramp led from the hole to the desk. The dragon Thorolos had seen jump down strode to the desk. Synarth tossed him one of the stone tablets. He looked at it, wiped it off with his paw, slotted it into one of the walls, and flew back up to the doorway he had jumped out of. Thorolos looked more closely at the walls. They doubled as massive shelves, containing thousands of the stone slabs.

Thorolos was only on the second level. Thankfully. He jumped down, the small fall still sending bolts of agony through his paws. He looked up at Synarth. She moved like a whirlwind. She grabbed a tablet, looked at one side - it was covered in ice with thin, small letters scratched into it - blew a new layer of frost over it, scratched a new set of letters, and threw the tablet back into a shelf, all in a matter of seconds. She was constantly moving, using her wings to keep balanced, her tail to shift tablets in shelves behind her, and her paws to constantly grab and replace the small stone tablets. As he watched, a tablet clattered down the ramp onto the desk, and the dragon used her tail to toss the tablet to an empty paw. She cursed, rewrote the tablet, and slid it into place.

Awed, and not wanting to disrupt her, Thorolos looked at the stones in the walls. He took one out gently. It was completely blank, without ice on either side.

"HEY!"

Thorolos hastily put the tablet back. The blue whirlwind behind the desk had frozen. She glared at him.

"Um, sorry. I was told you could help me," Thorolos said.

"Are you new?" she asked.

"Yeah. The King told me to-"

"I know, I know. Orders came in a minute ago. Someone is already on the way." She squinted at him. Confusion spread across her face. "Prince Thorolos? What in the twelve hells are you doing here?"

"I... guess I'm here to work?"

Chapter 19

After sleeping in his niche on the first floor - he couldn't well get to the seventh floor dormitories with his wing joint still injured - Thorolos felt much better. His paws were hurting less than before. The dormitories, while dark, were... more pleasant than the royal dormitories. The quiet bustle of clawless dragons made the place seem more alive. His dormitory looked nearly identical to the one on the second layer, including the passageway out of the other end.

He walked out to Synarth, who was still whirling around her desk. He must have been sleeping for at least a few hours, and she still hadn't slowed a beat.

"You're awake. Good." She still seemed shocked that one of the princes had been made a servant. "ZED!" she bellowed. Thorolos flattened his ears against his head. A few moments passed. Synarth took another breath just as a deep blue dragon hopped down from the second level.

"I'm here, I'm here," the blue dragon said sleepily.

"You aren't working today, right?"

The blue dragon's face fell. "Let me guess, now I am?"

"Technically, no." Synarth turned to Thorolos. "This is Zedryn. He'll be showing you around, teaching you the basics, getting you acquainted with the place. I should have your schedule by tomorrow."

"Come on! One day a month! Is that too much to ask?" Zedryn implored her.

"The faster he knows what he's doing, the faster you can get back to sleeping. Oh, and if he asks me any stupid questions, I'll know who to blame."

"It's not my fault she wasn't paying attention when I told her where the bathrooms were!"

"I've already told you, it definitely was. Now go!" Synarth turned away from them and Zedryn groaned dramatically.

"Come on," Zedryn said. He strode to one of the doors. Thorolos hurried to keep up.

"First, you make me late to lunch, then you ruin my day off?" Zedryn said accusingly as they walked towards the labyrinth of corridors that led away from the dormitories. "I should just ditch you in the corridors and hope you starve." Thorolos grew pale.

"It's not my fault! I was just-" Thorolos was interrupted by Zedryn's laughter.

"I'm just messing with you! We were all new once. Anyway, I've got to make sure you don't have any more stupid questions before I let you go. Basically, while you are on your shift, you go to Synarth or Syphys to get your orders. Your orders have directions to where you are needed and instructions on what to do."

"Wait, who's Syphys? And... well, how would directions even help? All these corridors look the same," Thorolos said.

"Syphys is the other dispatcher. As far as directions go, I'll show you." Zedryn stopped at an intersection. He brushed the lines carved into the right side of the passage they were in.

"These lines tell us where we are going. The patterns on the right wall let us know what direction the right path is. Left wall, left path. The one on the floor is for the path straight ahead," Zedryn said.

"Huh, okay! That makes more sense. I thought those lines were just from... well, from dragons scratching the walls," Thorolos said. Zedryn narrowed his eyes at him.

"What? How was I supposed to know they were a map?" Thorolos said defensively. Zedryn held up a deep blue paw.

"... Oh." Thorolos looked down at his own paws. No dragon that wasn't a servant wouldn't be caught dead in the servant tunnels.

Zedryn chuckled and shook his head. "Ask me all the stupid questions you want. I don't want Synarth breathing down my neck any more than she already does.

"The two patterns you have to remember yourself are the ones leading to the bathrooms, and the ones leading to the dining common. Bathroom is single, triple, double, single. There's one for every dormitory, so they aren't that hard to find. Food is triple, triple, triple, single, double, but you have to start from the dormitory we left from.

"Synarth writes the way back too, but Syphys doesn't. My advice? Spend the next few days getting familiar with the paths around the dormitories. Worst case scenario, you have to wander around looking for someone to lead you back. You'll get twenty lashes, of course, but you should be fine."

Thorolos paled again. "Twenty?" he asked quietly.

Zedryn burst out laughing again. "Of course not! Geez, learn to take a joke!" he jabbed playfully. Thorolos relaxed a bit. He smiled.

Chapter 20

In the extensive snowfields to the north of the Claws mountains, a hatchling plotted his escape. The city was amazing. The city was new. The city had more dragons than the hatchling had ever seen before. The city was a prison.

They had been living with Father's old friend for several weeks now, and while Father was home much more often, the hatchling missed their cave in the side of the mountains. Father, now that he was working every day for just enough food to help them survive, had not the time to fly the hatchling back to the mountains for a visit. Mother didn't want to go back. She said that living in the city was better, that Father could spend more time with them. But whenever Father came back, he was too tired to do anything but collapse. The hatchling saw Father more, but he spent far less time with him.

Besides that, the city was cramped. The hatchling couldn't see the faintest thing on the horizon unless he left the city entirely. Even when he did leave the city, the only thing to see was snow, snow, and more snow. No more trotting out of his home to marvel at the vast expanse of the mountain ranges and the pieces of jagged, broken ice that shot from the snowfields. Just white plains as far as the eye could see.

The hatchling decided he would go back to the mountains on his own.

He still couldn't fly, he hadn't the faintest idea of how to hunt, but none of that mattered. He would get back to his mountain home if it was the last thing he did.

The hatchling tried to flee the city several times. At first, it was only to get away from the claustrophobic press of buildings, out onto the snowfields, but as his longing to see the mountains increased, so did the complexity of his plans. His master plan took shape over weeks, putting itself together like a puzzle in his head.

The hatchling resolved to wait for a snowy day. The snow would cover his tracks and keep him from being followed. Even on his most successful escape attempt, when he had gotten out of sight of the city, Mother had been able to simply follow his tracks. He had gotten a stern scolding, a painful hole in the tip of his ear as punishment, and an even stronger will to get away.

Weeks passed, and the snows didn't come. The hatchling was patient. He knew that if he failed again, his punishment would be far worse than a simple prick. With the time he was given, he planned further ahead. His home was south. The sun rose in the east - or was it the west? No, it had to be the east. The sun had always risen over the menacing twin peaks, right between the dual summits, like the mountains were some giant dragon shooting a ball of fire into the sky. The twin peaks always loomed to his right whenever he left the cave, so they had to be to the east. Right? The hatchling daren't ask his mother, lest she catch on to what he was planning.

Finally, one day, the snows rolled in. Massive, dark, billowing clouds covered the sky, and not long after, they started dumping snow down onto the city. The hatchling ran out into the falling snow, looking up at the clouds gratefully. Today was the day he would embark on his journey back to the mountains. All he had to do was walk south. South... keep the sun on his left in the morning and on his right in the evening.

The hatchling cursed himself for his stupidity. He hadn't thought of that! There would be no way to see the sun while it was snowing, and no way for him to escape while the sun was out. He couldn't, for the life of him, remember which direction the sun had always risen in this cursed city.

The hatchling was determined, however. There was no telling when the next snows would fall. This was his chance, and he wasn't about to let it go to waste. The hatchling retraced his steps to where they had first landed. He vividly remembered gliding to a stop right before the city's main road. He remembered gliding over the city from the opposite direction! He knew it, he just knew south had to be that way. The hatchling turned his nose south and ran as fast as his legs could carry him.

The snows hadn't fallen in weeks, so the snowfields were barren of powder. Only hard, packed snow remained. Perfect for his serrated claws to grip into. His wild steps left shallow prints in the snow, but they were quickly filled by the falling powder. The hatchling ran and ran. The city grew smaller on the horizon. It eventually disappeared behind him, leaving skyline blank and white. The snow slowed him to a trot, and eventually to a plodding walk, but he never turned course, never stopped. He would get to his mountain home.

The clouds kept dumping snow down atop the hatchling. The sky grew darker and darker. The hatchling decided that he had no recourse but to sleep for the night. At least the ground was covered in fresh powder.

He pointed himself south, lying completely straight. He gently drifted off on the pillows of powder on which he lay.

. . .

The hatchling couldn't breathe. He shot his eyes open, and was blinded by the snow that had fallen atop him during the night. He panicked. Flailing wildly, he burst from the snow that had encased him throughout the night. The hatchling looked around, still breathing heavily. The whole world had been encased in a tomb of cold, white powder. The clouds still loomed above him, but they had ceased snowing for the moment. The hatchling oriented himself as best he could and started off once again. The powder came up to his belly. He still crawled onward, more swimming than walking.

The clouds gradually lightened. They thinned, and the sun eventually burnt its way through them. To the hatchling's horror, the sun was rising to his right. He knew he was still walking in the same direction he had been the day prior.

Maybe this whole "return to the mountains" idea hadn't been such a great master plan.

The hatchling tried to suppress the panic bubbling up within him. He ran as fast as he could back to where he had fallen asleep. He tried to tell what direction he had been travelling.

His flailing had destroyed any trace of which way he had been facing the night before.

He was alone.

He was lost.