She felt as if she wandered through a dream. The memory stone was nearly impervious to the encroaching of organic life. As long as it recalled what it was supposed to be, it rejected the tendriling roots of plants. Animals who might have claimed the city as a place to nest and den were turned aside by the stone’s memories of men and women dwelling there. Even after all these years, she saw only tentative signs that the natural world would eventually reclaim this place. Moss had begun to find its first footholds in the fine cracks between the paving stones and in the angles of the steps. Crows and ravens, ever scornful of humanity’s claims of mastery, had a few messy nests jutting out from window ledges or wedged into belfries. Algae stained the edges of the fountains that still held rain water trapped in their ornate basins. Domes had caved in on themselves. The outer walls of some buildings had collapsed in some long-ago quake, leaving the interior chambers open to the autumn day and scattering rubble across the street below them. Eventually, nature always triumphed. The Elderlings’ city would ultimately be swallowed by the wild world, and then no one would remember a time when man and dragon had dwelt together.

It surprised Tintaglia that such a thought could cut her heart. Humanity as it now existed little appealed to her. There had been a time, her ancestors whispered in the back of her brain, when dragon essence mingled with the nature of men, and Elderlings emerged from that accidental blending. Tall and slender, dragon-eyed and golden-skinned, that ancient race had lived alongside dragons and gloried in the symbiosis. Tintaglia walked slowly down streets made generously wide enough to allow a dragon to pass in ease. She came to their halls of government, and ascended the wide, shallow steps that had been engineered to allow her kind gracious access to the gathering halls of the Elderlings. The exterior walls of this building still gleamed blackly, while figures of gleaming white decorated the exterior in bas-relief. Cariandra the Fecund still endlessly plowed her fields behind her team of massive oxen, while on the adjacent wall Sessicaria spread wide his wings and trumpeted silently.

Tintaglia passed between the impassive stone lions that guarded the entrance. One wide door had already collapsed. As she brushed past the other immense wooden door, a chance graze of her tail brought it slumping down into a heap of splinters and fragments. Wood had not the memory of stone.

Within, polished oak tables had given way to become heaps of wood dust trapped under the stone tabletops they had once supported. Dust had coated thick the windows; sunlight hardly penetrated the room. Threadbare reminders of rich tapestries were shredded cobwebs on the walls. Memories clustered thickly here and clamored at her, but she resolutely kept her mind to this day and this time. Silence and dust and the wind whispering dismally through a broken window. Perhaps somewhere in the building written records had survived. But fading words on crumbling parchment would be no solace to her. There was nothing here for her.

For a moment longer, she stood, looking about, then she flung herself back on her hind legs and stretched out her neck to roar her anger and disappointment, trumpeting out her betrayal to the infuriating ghosts of the place. The blast of her voice shook the stagnant air of the room. Her lashing tail scattered the fragments of desks and benches and flung a marble tabletop crashing into a corner. Across the hall, a tapestry gave up its last futile grip and cascaded to the floor in threads. Dust motes whirled alarmingly in the air. She whipped her head back and forth on the end of her serpentine neck, trumpeting out blast after blast of fury.

Then, as suddenly as the fit had seized her, it passed. She let her front legs drop back to the cool black floor. She fell silent and listened to the last echoes of her own voice fade and die. Fade and die, she thought. They all have done so, and I am the last foolish echo, still bouncing off these stones with no ears to hear me.

She left the hall and prowled the deserted streets of the dead city. Light was fading from the day. She had flown swift and hard to come to this place, only to discover death here. The stalwart memory of the stone had left it a stagnant place. The city had perished decades ago, yet life had not managed to reclaim this place. The veins of moss that struggled in the seams of the street were pathetic. Typical of humans, Tintaglia thought disdainfully. What they can no longer use, they have prevented any other creatures from using. An instant later, the bitterness of the thought shocked her. Did she believe, then, that the Elderlings had been no different from the humans who had left her imprisoned for so many years?

A stone-lipped well and the remnants of a windlass distracted her from those thoughts. She felt a pleasant rush of anticipation at the sight. She sought the ancient memory. Ah, yes. Here, long ago, others of her kind had drunk, not water, but the liquid silver flow of the magic that veined the memory stone. Even to a dragon, it had been a powerful intoxicant. To drink of it, undiluted, was to realize a oneness with the universe. The memory was a tantalizing one. She felt a rush of longing for that sense of connection. She snuffed the edge of the well, then peered into its depths. As she shifted her head, she thought she caught a distant shimmer of silver at the very bottom, but she could not be sure. Did not stars shine in daytime in the bottoms of the deepest wells? It might be no more than that. Whatever it was, it was far beyond the reach of her teeth or claws. She would not drink her fill of liquid magic here. No dragon would ever do so again. To have recalled that untasted pleasure was but one more torment to her. It defined the agony of her solitude. With great deliberation, she smashed the rusted remnants of the windlass and pushed them down the well. She listened to the clanking as the pieces rattled down the narrow hole.