Li flapped backwards, torn between the desire to defend herself and fear of hurting her maybe-siblings. Even if it turned out these dragons weren’t family, they still bore runes, and so couldn’t be held accountable for their actions. Though… She blinked, trying to focus on the runes inside the dantian of a white-scaled female that was twice her size and making a very good attempt to bite her.

  Like the gold dragon who might be Li’s mother, the white dragon’s dantian held faint, foggy runes. They were definitely there, and they were actually a bit more distinct than those the gold dragon bore, but they were far from the dark strokes that lurked in the dantian of every other dragon Li had seen.

  Quickly, she tried concealing herself, only to find that while three of the other dragons looked confused, the white female, as well as a dragon with bluish-silver scales, continued to stare straight at her. Oh, yes, that was a dragon ability, not something only Li could use, so she quickly shifted to Kyla’s technique instead, hiding behind the wavering air caused by excessive Fire ki. It, too, had its drawbacks, but at least for the moment, all five young dragons lost track of Li, allowing her to return to the golden adult.

  The foggy runes slipped from her grasp once, then twice, until she felt Kaz reach out, steadying her as she had so often done for him. Pushing away desperation and near-panic, Li drew in a deep breath and made the runes in her own mind as insubstantial as the ones she was trying to remove. She could feel Kaz’s belief that this would work, and apparently the world believed him, because this time the insensate rune dissolved, sending the older dragon into paroxysms of coughing.

  Then it was time for the five young dragons to panic, each landing and coming forward to peer at their mother with worried eyes. When she coughed up a stinking mess of black sludge, her ribs standing out beneath her skin with each gasping breath, the smaller dragons began to click and hiss, pacing from side to side. Li, too, stared in horror, almost too worried to hold onto her concealment. If Kaz hadn’t been there, she had no doubt she would have looked just like the other five, except that they probably would have turned on her as soon as they saw her.

   Li whimpered to Kaz.

   Kaz said, warmth flowing through their bond.

  Rather than watching the trembling dragon as she wheezed, Li turned her attention to the older female’s core. Kaz was right, it was still strong, spinning out gold and white ki in a steady flow. It was this cycle that carried away the foulness Li had stripped from her dantian, allowing her body to expel it.

  By the time the golden dragon finished coughing, she lay half in and half out of her roost. She must have crammed herself in before, because she was quite a bit larger than Li had believed at first, making her wonder how large her father must have been. In response, Kaz showed Li an image of the two dragons curled up around the nest together, and Li compared that image to the dragon in front of her.

  If this truly was Li’s mother, she had lost a great deal of weight, transforming from a sleek, graceful creature to the heap of scales and bones that lay on the ground. The horns were the same, though, as were the subtle, silvery markings trailing from behind her eyes and down her neck. Li glanced at the five smaller - though all larger than her - dragons, and saw similar markings, which also matched the gradations of her own original coloring.

  Closing her eyes, Li swallowed hard, then dropped her camouflage. Four of the five young dragons spun toward her immediately, hissing, while the largest, the white female, moved in between Li and the adult sprawled on the ground.

  Li lifted her wings, prepared to defend herself if she must, but Intong moved to stand behind her. He wasn’t particularly large, not yet, but he was bigger than any but the mother dragon, and he gave a long, low roar as he bared his teeth at the five. It was enough. They didn’t flee, but they also didn’t attack, which gave their mother time to climb to her paws.

   that almost-familiar voice said again, and Li shivered. There was more awareness in it, and in the golden eyes that watched her, and she dared to hope that they might be able to truly communicate, even so soon after the runes had been removed.

   Li managed, waving a claw at the five young ones.

  The thin dragon tilted her head.

   Li asked. In a burst of inspiration driven by desperation, she pulled up Kaz’s memory of the nest, and the pair of dragons who tended to it so diligently. Gathering her ki, she formed a picture in the air between them, and the golden dragon froze, staring.

   she said, and there was an unbearable chasm of pain in the word.

   Li said, wishing she could…what did dragons do to comfort each other? Did they hug, like humans, or did they lick each other, like kobolds? She pointed at the sleek golden dragon nudging an egg with her nose, carefully turning it.

   the dragon echoed, then looked around at the five young dragons, seeming almost surprised to find them there. She spread her wings slowly, as if she’d all but forgotten how to use them, and covered the young dragons with the appendages protectively.

  There was a hard lump in Li’s throat, and she was glad she didn’t have to use it to speak. Pointing to a small, forgotten egg at the very edge of the nest, she said,

  At first, her mother seemed confused, and Li was afraid she wouldn’t be able to understand, at least not yet. But then a claw lifted, indicating the egg, then Li.

  Li nodded, hearing the clicks and hisses emerging from her own throat as she struggled to maintain her composure. She shifted the image to one of the eggs hatching, with her own small egg in the background, shoved to the side to make room for the emerging hatchlings.

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  She showed herself, as Kaz remembered her, an egg cradled in a blue kobold hand, then a tiny golden dragon snapping at his fingers. Memory after memory was laid out for her mother’s inspection: Li peeking from Kaz’s pack, Li diving at the woshi to save Kaz, Kaz stroking her back as she slept in his arms, Kaz, Kaz, Kaz and Li, over and over. At last she stilled it on her own memory of Kaz as she had last seen him, staring out from beneath a rocky crag as she flew away.

  Her siblings gave soft clicks of confusion as they watched from beneath their mother’s wings, but the golden dragon took it all in, staring from the images to Li, then looking around as if searching for something. Finally, she lifted a claw and pointed at Kaz. she asked.

   Li told her.

   the female said, then,

  Li nodded, knowing as she did so that it was true. A little of that sense of the world had faded since she left Kaz, making her realize that part of what she felt had come from him, but she retained enough to feel the confirmation deep in her bones. she asked.

  Her mother made a sound that was part hiss, part soft roar, and ended with a little click. Li echoed it back to her. It most definitely was not a sound Kaz would be able to make, but it sounded a little like,

  Her mother repeated the sound she’d made, then said, She looked at the five young dragons, all crowded together beneath her wings. They weren’t small, and she wasn’t that large, but somehow they all made it work. Reaching out, she touched her nose to each of theirs, speaking their names. The white one was Zeses, and the silver-blue was Semre. The last three were a gold named Eosis, a blue called Sapin, and a deep orange-scaled male named Cysor.

  Li met each of her siblings with a deepening sense of unreality. It had been her goal to find the rest of her family since the moment Kaz first told her about them. Of course, her father was almost certainly dead, and her other four siblings had vanished into the wild when they were barely larger than Mei. Someday, she would find out what happened to them, too, but for now, she was well-satisfied to find a mother and five siblings all safe and together.

  Her next task was to remove the runes from all of them, and, as she should have expected, she found that it was far easier to clear her siblings’ dantians than her mother’s. Besides the fact that they were younger, all of their runes were a bit more solid than Sahrit’s, which made it a simple matter to push them free so they could be carried out of their bodies.

  This was actually the trickiest part, since of course they didn’t understand why they were all suddenly convulsing and expelling the same kind of dark foulness that had choked Sahrit, which made both Zeses and Semre snap at Li. Eosis seemed to be as calm as Sahrit, while Sapin and Cysor both backed down when their mother growled warningly at them.

  Soon enough, though, all five of the young dragons were staring around in dawning wonder. Li had been less than a day old when Kaz cleared the runes from her mind, and she had passed out immediately after, so she had no recollection of how it felt to go from having runes to not. Was the whole world different to them now? Was it like the way she felt when she saw the real sky for the first time? Or was it something more subtle, the thoughts old, but given depth by new understanding?

  Of course Sahrit didn’t let her offspring suffer alone, but gathered each to her as they convulsed. She ignored the sludge that coated her dull scales, nuzzling the five young dragons until they recovered. Eosis and Cysor seemed reluctant to leave this safe haven, but the other three all flew up to higher roosts once they had recovered, though Zeses still watched Li with wary eyes. None of them spoke, but so far as Li knew, they had never been exposed to any language other than that of dragons, unlike Li herself and the xiyi’s mounts.

  When they were all done, Li turned to her mother, focusing on the rune for stall. It was difficult to make it out, and she’d already removed a hundred or more runes today, but she refused to-

  Sahrit raised a claw. She lifted a wing. There were smears of black on the fine membrane stretched between the seemingly fragile bones, but that didn’t matter to Li. She stared at Eosis, who seemed to have fallen asleep on their mother’s other side, then took a step forward. The next thing Li knew, her side was pressed against her mother’s warm, scaly body, with a wing curved over her, protecting her just as Sahrit had protected the others.

   Sahrit said.

  Li could feel the weight of it tugging on her mind, but she shook her head stubbornly.

  A single huff of breath made Sahrit’s ribs contract in something that might have been a laugh.

  Li listened, and though her mind was too foggy with sleep to put it together, Kaz said,

   Li asked, horrified.

  Kaz sent affirmation.

  Li glanced toward her mother, who she could already tell she was going to like, very, very much. Lowering her voice, even though Sahrit couldn’t hear words spoken through the bond between Kaz and Li, Li said,

   Kaz said.

   Li agreed, laying her head on her front feet and allowing her eyes to fall closed. She had a great deal of work to do. Work which she suspected would take longer than she either expected or hoped. But it was worth doing, and Kaz would be with her the entire time.

  The weight of her mother’s wing and the slow rise and fall of Sahrit’s ribs combined with the beating of a great heart lulled Li to sleep, but Sahrit lay awake, her mind working in a way it never had before. Thoughts and memories came together, and she watched the gold-scaled dragonling resting beside her. Her sorrow had caused her to waste away, but now she understood that though her mate was gone, she could not lose herself. When this strange new child woke, she would find food and clean herself. She had a family to care for.

  Lucky Rabbit tomorrow (yes, Saturday)! There will be five chapters the first day, four the next, three the day after that, and so on until we're back to our regular schedule. The timing of these will jump around like crazy, so more people have eyes on it if they watch the Latest Updates board. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I'd love to see you all there! I do like slow burn, so things will start out nice and gentle, when I kill off the main character.

  will release a 'chapter' of TBK on Tuesday. This is not a story chapter. I will talk about some of the reasons I wrote Broken Knife (besides Kobold Awareness), and if you still have questions (looking at you melluruva ??) I will attempt to answer them. I'll also link my Discord, which totally exists. Totally. But the main reason I'm making this a separate post is so you can share your fanfics, pictures, and thoughts. This chapter isn't for me, it's for you. When I publish TBK in novel form, all but a few of the earliest chapters will vanish (I don't delete them, just unpublish them) and unfortunately that means all of your wonderful work will vanish as well. So put them in the comments on that chapter, and they will never be removed!