Page 36 of Entwined

“I’m the only non-earth blessed among our people who can successfully process nutrition from the flesh of other things—not just my own kind.”

I have to scrunch up my nose to ask this. “What happens when you do eat an earth dragon?”

He shrugs. “I never have.”

“Whoa,” I say. “Does Big Daddy know that?”

Axel goes back to pacing. “At first, he preferred me because of the prophecy. It made my siblings hate me. Euphrasia pushed me to share her food, worried that only eating marine life, I’d be slower, weaker, and smaller when it mattered.”

“And?” He’s not good at telling stories, clearly.

“The first time one of the other flame blessed tried to kill me, I defeated them.”

“Wait, they try to kill you?”

“The magic from the creatures we consume sustains us,” Axel says. “The strongest among us have defeated others of their kind. Eliminating your competition is a sort of a side-bonus.”

“You kill and eat your siblings, and that’s encouraged?” When he said he didn’t understand my protection of Coral and Jade and Sammy, I had no idea what he meant. I mean, I knew the dragons were different, but I didn’t realize they ate each other.

“I’m not sure if we always did, but we do now.”

“Let me get this straight.” Now I’m pacing too. “You can’t lay more eggs, so the blessed that exist are all that will exist.” I stop long enough to wait for his answer.

He nods.

I go back to pacing. “But you also kill each other so you can have the strongest boss?”

“My people always have.”

“But?”

“After I defeated my brother Rumsted, I refused to kill him.”

I imagine that went over well. “And?”

“I thought my father might explode, but he didn’t. He was impressed by my willingness to forgo my own desire for power for the good of our people.”

“How did your siblings react?”

“Most of them thought I was an easy mark and tried harder to kill me.”

“What about Hyperion?” I have to ask, since he’s the only one I’ve met.

“He never attacked me of his own volition, and he stopped eating the others, too.”

So his dad sent an ally, basically. “Maybe your dad coming won’t be so bad. He could have sent someone worse, presumably.”

“He could have,” Axel says. “But he sent Hyperion with a threat.”

That’s true. “Okay, so about the heart, though.” We’ve gotten sidetracked again.

“Dad wouldn’t tell me exactly what it was, but he said the heart was a seal they put inside the earth to keep the humans on earth safe after their departure.”

“A seal?”

“That’s as close to a translation as I can come,” Axel says. “It’s something that blocks something else.”

“And it was inside the earth?”