The dragon god sighed at my questions and sat back on her flaming haunches. “How much do you know about dragon fire?”
“Nothing really,” I said, which wasn’t precisely true. My dad never told me anything about his magic, but I’d figured out a great deal on my own through observation and publicly available information. But while I was reasonably confident I could hold my own in the conversation, I’d never met a dragon who didn’t love showing off their knowledge, and I had a lot of ground to make up from my earlier blunders. “Please, great dragon,” I said sweetly. “Would you explain it to me?”
As I’d hoped, the Spirit of Dragons preened at the request. “Oh, you’re good,” she said, flicking a long claw to summon a torch-sized tongue of glittering orange-and-gold fire from her body. “Dragons don’t have souls like humans. Instead, we have this.” She extended her claws, holding out the glittering flame until it was all I could see. “Dragon fire is the font of our magic and the source of our life. It sparks before we hatch and grows with us as we age. That’s why ancient dragons are so much more powerful than young ones: the bigger the fire, the better the dragon.”
I nodded, remembering how much larger my father had been than his little sister.
“Fire is what makes a dragon a dragon,” the god went on, her voice grave. “This is critical to understand. Unlike humans, our bodies can recover from almost any injury, but if our fire goes out, we die. It is our life. That said, it is also still just fire. It can be smothered or doused just like a normal flame. It can also be stolen, which is precisely what White Snake was attempting to do to your father. She wanted to leapfrog her own abilities by eating Yong’s flame and adding his power to her own. That’s by far the easiest way to get a leg up if you’re small. But White Snake couldn’t eat Yong’s fire, because by the time she cornered him, his flame was already gone.”
My stomach sank. Despite claiming not to recognize me, the Spirit of Dragons seemed to know a lot about my family affairs. “So White Snake’s attack wasn’t what did this to him?” I asked, nodding at my dad’s comatose body.
“I’m sure she didn’t help,” the spirit said. “Getting slashed up and losing most of your blood is taxing for anyone. But ultimately speaking, this situation was all Yong’s doing. He had no business casting such an open-ended curse or holding it for as long as he did. Remember what I said about fire being our power and our magic? When Yong cursed you to have bad luck, he was doing the magical equivalent of burning the candle at both ends, giving you an open tab on the magic he also needed to stay alive, which is how he ended up in this predicament.” She scowled down at my father. “Really, a dragon his age should know better. But while he is very low, he hasn’t burned out yet. That’s the nice part of having fire for your magic. Unlike humans who are tied to their biology, we dragons can reignite. Even if our physical bodies are destroyed, so long as a single spark of our fire persists, we can always come back. Trust me, I know from personal experience.”
There was a world of history in that last sentence, but I was too excited to follow it. “So my dad can recover?”
“So long as his fire hasn’t completely gone out, yes,” the dragon god said, but she wasn’t smiling. “Unfortunately, this is where your situation gets…odd. Remember how I didn’t notice him when I came in? That wasn’t just me being dismissive. I literally could not feel his fire. If I wasn’t standing here watching him breathe, I’d say his last spark had already burned out. But his body is still functioning, so there must be something in there. Unfortunately, I’m not actually sure what that is.”
My body slumped. The god of dragons had been my last hope. If she didn’t know how to fix this, we were lost. The defeat I felt at that thought was enough to send me to the ground. I’d almost folded all the way over when the dragon’s fiery tail smacked me in the face.
“Stop that,” she commanded, snaking her head down to glare at me. “Now’s not the time to be a sad sack. As a famous human once said, ‘mostly dead is still partially alive,’ and alive for us means fire. Yong’s flame must be in there somewhere or he’d be totally dead. Since he’s not, all we should have to do to bring him back is build that fire back up.”
“How?” I breathed.
The dragon tapped her burning claws on my bedroom floor, singeing the wood. “That’s a tricky question. Usually a dragon’s flames come back on their own, though they can also be fed through other sources. Usually by killing and eating another dragon, but there are less gruesome means of getting fire, one of which is family. The more dragons you have in your clan, the more power flows up the chain back to you.”
“Wait,” I said, confused. “You’re saying dragons share power with other dragons they’re related to?”
“Not share,” she scoffed. “Dragons never share. Clan fire is a strictly top-down affair. If you’re at the bottom of a clan, your fire gets sucked up the pyramid whether you like it or not, which is why most dragons prefer to be at the top.” She flashed me a toothy smile. “Haven’t you ever wondered why dragons have such big families despite our bad habit of
