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Breken, or even like dragons. His magic was different. He didn’t call on it, instead, it lived within him. He didn’t use magic; he was magic. I’m not explaining it right.
    “You said your mother was killed. Did you have a father?” Darius was genuinely interested. Dragons were not typically forthcoming with personal information, and in all his time in Darak, he had only read a brief passage or two on dragon lore.
    I have no idea who my father was, and all I know of my mother is that she died trying to protect me. Oke said she could have saved herself by abandoning the nest. He was unable to arrive in time to save her. My mother must have been extraordinary. I’m sorry I never knew her.
    Oke told me he kept me warm when he took me back to his home. He had a cottage deep in the Ever Wood. My earliest recollection is of his eyes. As I recall, the day I hatched, he was standing over me with a delighted grin on his face. I looked up into those mischievous eyes and just stared. On that day, one eye was blue, and the other a mossy green. Being newly hatched, I had no knowledge of anything, so seeing the face of a man did not alarm me.
    Time flew by for the two of us. After only a few weeks of bumping around inside the small cottage, Oke constructed a place for me to shelter outside of his home. He was exceedingly patient, but I wasn’t particularly graceful, and his furniture suffered for it. He enlarged one of his windows so I could put my head inside and speak to him through it. When I had grown still larger, he added an opening in the roof with a mat of rushes that could be closed against the rain when needed.
    I learned to speak quickly, and he taught me to read several languages. He read to me every day. He told me histories of whole races of people that are now long gone. He shared tales of the gods, and the one god, Rah. Rah always confounded me. How a being can always have been makes no sense to me. Oke told me that Rah is the creator of all things, the original circle, without beginning or end. Rah is too much of a mystery to me.
    Tolah is my God. He was the first of all dragon kind, both mother and father. Oke said that Rah created Tolah, as he did everything else. I’m all right with that. Tolah had to come from somewhere. With Tolah, I know where I stand. Rah is too unpredictable, always weaving new threads into the world to create some ultimate design that only he can see.
    “Is Tolah still alive?” Dearra asked. 
    So far as I know. I haven’t heard from him in over a thousand years, so—
    “Heard from him? What does that mean?” Dearra couldn’t imagine how dragons could possibly correspond with each other.
    Like I said, Tolah is the first dragon. We say He, but Tolah is both male and female. Every dragon can hear and speak with Tolah, if He chooses to respond, that is. We pray to Him, but He rarely speaks back, unless it is to give a command or warning of some kind, and even that is rare. When I was trapped in the sword, I was able to hear mortals, but I could no longer hear Tolah.
    “If he didn’t talk much, how did you even know you weren’t able to hear him anymore?”
    His presence is always felt. It’s like a vibration, or hum.
    “And that was gone?”
    Completely.
    “You said you were with Oke for several hundred years. How did he die?” Darius asked.
    I should have seen it coming, but he was always old, so I didn’t notice him aging in any noticeable way, except that he seemed to move a bit more slowly, and tire more easily. He used to disappear for days at a time. He would take long, rambling walks through the woods and then appear again out of the blue. I was off doing my own exploring, so we would sometimes spend weeks apart. I returned after one such journey and poked my head through the roof opening to find him lying in bed. It was near to mid-day, and I had expected to find him puttering about, or deep in one of his books.
    ‘Oh, good. You have returned,’ he said to me. ‘I