Undercurrents Within the Dragon Race

Chromie hummed a little tune as she skipped through the bronze corridors of the Ruby Sanctum. She had deliberately changed into a glittering little gnome dress today, and the Time Sandglass hanging at her waist jingled with every step.

"Your Majesty~" she drawled, pulling a small cloth pouch embroidered with gold thread from her pocket. "I'm here, and I brought a gift."

Alexstrasza was resting atop the crystal platform at the center of the sanctuary. At the sound, she raised her dragon head. Her scales shimmered a weary crimson beneath the sanctuary's glow, yet a hint of warmth still flashed through her eyes when she saw Chromie.

"Chronormu," the Red Dragon Queen said in a low, gentle voice, "what are you plotting this time?"

"Oh, I was just passing by!" Chromie grinned as she climbed onto the platform and poured a handful of gold coins beside the queen's claws. "Look, aren't these coins pretty?"

The coins turned between the dragon claws, reflecting the gryphon designs painstakingly carved by Ironforge craftsmen. Chromie leaned closer. "Oh, right, I also brought a copy of Eastern Kingdoms Fairy Tales!" She pulled a gilded picture book from her backpack. "The children at Stormwind City's orphanage all said it was wonderful."

The Red Dragon Queen's claw paused slightly.

".Though there are so many orphans now." Chromie sighed as if by accident. "Silvermoon City burned terribly. Even the elves' fairy-tale books were burned away."

The air in the sanctuary suddenly froze. Pretending not to notice, Chromie continued flipping through the picture book. "Look, isn't this story, The Little Red Dragon, interesting? It's about a little dragon saving a village."

"Chronormu." Alexstrasza gently closed the picture book. "The Dragon Race does not interfere in mortal wars."

"I know~" Chromie swung her little feet. "I just think..." She suddenly pointed at the illustration on the final page—an Orc-burned village. "If the Aspect Dragons had helped back then, wouldn't these villagers have survived?"

The Red Dragon Queen silently pushed the picture book back to her. Her claw tips left several scorched marks across the stone platform. "The fate of mortals should be written by mortals themselves."

Chromie blinked, suddenly adopting an innocent tone. "Then what if—I mean, just what if—some mortals were about to go extinct? Like the High Elves?"

"Enough!" Alexstrasza's Dragon Awe erupted without warning, sending Chromie's braids flying wildly in the blast. But in the next instant, the queen returned to being that gentle elder. ".Would you like to see my newly hatched dragon eggs?"

Chromie bit her lollipop, her eyes curving into crescents. "Sure~"

Chromie sat on a low stool in the dragon egg incubation chamber, swinging her two short legs as she noisily sucked on her lollipop. The Red Dragon Queen was gently nudging a faintly glowing dragon egg with her snout, as delicately as if she were handling fragile morning dew.

"Your Majesty~" Chromie suddenly said, with deliberate innocence in her voice, "when I flew over Northrend yesterday, I saw that icy lump next to Dragonblight Temple still belching black smoke."

Alexstrasza's dragon eyes narrowed slightly, but her movements did not pause. "Icecrown Glacier has always been a bitterly cold land."

"No!" Chromie waved her little hands dramatically. "I mean that mountain with the huge ice spike stuck in it! It's less than three hundred miles from our sanctuary!" She counted on her fingers. "Look, it's so close to us. I just don't feel safe."

"—Lich King's Throne." The Red Dragon Queen finally raised her head, her golden slit pupils staring directly at Chromie. "What exactly are you trying to say, Chronormu?"

Chromie blinked her big eyes. "I'm just curious~ Such a huge Undead nest, constantly bubbling out Abominations and Ghouls, with only a snowfield between us..." She suddenly lowered her voice. "What if the Lich King loses his mind one day and sends a Frostwyrm Legion over for a visit?"

The temperature in the egg chamber suddenly rose. Several eggs near the Red Dragon Queen developed scorched marks across their shells. Alexstrasza immediately restrained her dragon breath, but Chromie had already noticed the lava dripping from her claw tips.

"The Aspect Dragons do not interfere in mortal—"

"—wars, I know~" Chromie cut in with a grin.

Chromie licked a newly unwrapped strawberry-flavored lollipop, her little leather shoes tapping lightly against the crystal floor of the egg chamber. The Red Dragon Queen was still tending to that faintly glowing egg, but the scorching heat in the air had already exposed the rage she was suppressing.

"Speaking of which..." Chromie suddenly stopped swinging her legs, her voice unusually low. "I saw Sapphiron in Northrend a few days ago."

Alexstrasza's claws suddenly tightened, and a faint cracking sound came from the dragon egg's shell. She immediately loosened her grip, but the crack had already remained.

"Oh no, the shell cracked!" Chromie jumped off the stool and hurried over with feigned panic. "Should I call a Bronze Dragon healer—"

"Go on." The Red Dragon Queen's voice seemed to rise from the abyss.

Chromie tilted her head, rolling the lollipop around in her mouth. "Sapphiron is so ugly now. He's covered in ice shards, with blue fire in his eyes, flying through the sky and helping the Lich King kill people." She counted on her fingers. "He's been circling Dragonblight."

"Enough!"

The temperature in the egg chamber surged in an instant, and the Titan Runes on the walls lit up with blinding blue light. Chromie's braids were blown straight by the heatwave, but she did not move at all. She merely continued in an innocent tone:

"The worst part is that the Lich King put an iron collar on him, engraved with 'Arthas's Most Loyal Servant.'"

The red stone floor melted into lava beneath the Red Dragon Queen's claws. Sparks burst from between Alexstrasza's scales, but in the end, she did nothing.

"We... cannot interfere." The words seemed forced painfully through her teeth.

Chromie suddenly hurled her lollipop to the ground. The glassy candy shattered into fragments. "You can endure even seeing one of your own turned into a weapon of war?!" Her gnome disguise began to destabilize, and temporal power spilled from the corners of her eyes. "Will Krasus be next? Or me? Or—"

"—You don't understand at all!" Alexstrasza's roar shattered every stained-glass window in the dragon egg chamber. Gale-force winds rushed in, blowing away the magic sustaining Chromie's disguise and exposing her Bronze Dragon form for a moment—but in the next instant, the Red Dragon Queen had regained her calm. Lowering her head, she licked the cracked dragon egg, her voice suddenly exhausted beyond measure. "You are still young, Chronormu. Some shackles are heavier than death."

Chromie fell silent.

At Deren's home in Theramore, Chromie curled up on the sofa in Theramore's secret chamber, her bronze scales still trembling faintly with anger. Staring at the half-shattered lollipop in her hand, she spoke in an unprecedentedly low voice. ".Something is clearly wrong with her. She kept repeating that she wouldn't interfere in mortal wars. She couldn't even come up with a new excuse."

Deren did not answer immediately. He stood before the window, staring at the dark clouds over the distant horizon, his expression indescribably grave.

"No, she already said it," he suddenly said.

Chromie jerked her head up. "What?"

"You said Alexstrasza kept repeating one sentence: dragons cannot interfere in mortal wars," Deren said. "That is her true thought and course of action. Because it is an order."

All the Time Sandglasses in the room suddenly stopped. Chromie's pupils contracted into thin slits. "That's impossible! No one can order the Aspect Dragons—"

"—Is there really no one?" Deren sneered. "Have you forgotten how the Aspect Dragons came to be?" He deliberately paused. "In the earliest age, you were all merely wild, primitive dragons. Who bestowed divine power upon you and turned you into the five Aspect Dragons?"

Chromie's little claws sank deep into the sofa. "It was... it was..." She did not dare say that name.

"They have been absent for too long." Deren's voice pierced her scales like an ice spike. "You have forgotten their existence." He pointed north. "When Neltharion tried to break free of his shackles, all you saw was that he had 'gone mad.' Yet you never considered—"

"—Never considered that he might have been the first one to wake up." Chromie finished for him, suddenly trembling all over.

"My father didn't truly go mad! This is insane." Onyxia cried out. Through the mist, she had discovered an entirely new and terrifying world.

Deren walked over to the bookshelf, leaned against it, and said faintly, "Most noble families in Stormwind City like to keep dogs—for hunting or guarding the house. But there is always a leash around the dog's neck."

"This..." Chromie said hoarsely. "We are nothing more than guard dogs of some kind. The so-called Aspect Dragons are merely given a grander name. In essence, we are no different from the dogs kept by mortal nobles."

"My father may have seen this truth at some point in time. So he had to go mad." Onyxia sighed. "And because of his madness, Brother and I gained temporary freedom."

"Could it be..." Her voice was as soft as a mosquito's buzz. "The Scourge has been permitted?"

Deren did not answer directly. He pushed open the window and let the salty sea breeze pour in. In the distance, the lights of Theramore's square were bright, and people were preparing for tomorrow's rescue operation.

"Think about it. If all the races of Azeroth united because of the Undead crisis..." His words mingled with the sea wind. "Wouldn't that make for a very successful story of justice and unity defeating evil? A story that could be passed down for a thousand years."

Chromie suddenly felt cold all over. As a Bronze Dragon, she knew better than anyone that such stories did not happen only occasionally—they had always been happening. The War of the Ancients had been like this. The Orc Invasion had been like this. This Undead invasion was even more so.

"What should we do?" she asked quietly.

Deren rubbed the Agricultural Company emblem. "First, save whoever can be saved." His gaze turned north. "We are readers outside the story. Let us break the arrangements within it."

"Interesting, oh ho ho..." Onyxia burst into laughter. "Too interesting! I love unexpected surprises." As she spoke, she stepped forward and hugged Deren. "Do you already have a plan? I can't wait to see the old monsters' faces when they are stunned by the unexpected."

"Shh!" Deren gently pressed a fingertip to her lips. "Do not casually speak of them. Their ears and eyes are very sharp."

Onyxia nodded.

Chromie jumped off her chair and paced back and forth, supporting her chin with her left hand and wearing a puzzled expression. "There's one final question. What is their purpose in doing all this? They are already beings beyond the mortal world, possessing supreme wisdom. They wouldn't waste energy doing something meaningless. Deren, what do you think?"

"My thoughts are not all that complicated, actually." Deren grinned. "I once heard a story back home. There was a noble with a great estate, but he had only one son to inherit it. He was old and in poor health, so he wanted to properly train his son. Can you understand that feeling?"

The two female dragons nodded.

"Alright. Now he needed to turn a young master who enjoyed life and knew nothing into someone capable of inheriting the family estate in the shortest possible time. He had several choices." Deren raised a finger. "One method was to teach him personally—tell his son how to handle every sort of family matter, how to deal with other nobles, how to bargain with merchants, how to manage servants. In short, teach him every bit of knowledge he would need. It would be like having his son observe and imitate him. That is what a normal person would think of. But the drawback was that the process was slow, and he might learn it all for nothing."

"Of course, he could also hire professionals to teach him bookkeeping, martial arts, noble etiquette, and so on. There were simply too many things to teach, and there was no guarantee he would learn them all." Deren continued. "In the end, the old noble decided to try a brand-new method to make the child grow up in the shortest time possible."

"What method?" Chromie asked curiously.

"Pretend to die!" Deren said with shocking bluntness.

"What kind of method is that?" Chromie said disdainfully.

"Right, it is not a normal method," Deren explained. "But it has one advantage: it lets his son take over the family affairs directly, forcing him to face and solve every problem himself. Meanwhile, the old noble watches his son's actions from the shadows. If problems arise, he can offer all kinds of advice through the butler. This way, whenever he encounters difficulties, he follows the advice and solves them. Afterward, the young noble grows rapidly and becomes increasingly skilled at handling different situations."

"Eh, when you put it that way, it really is a good method." Chromie nodded, then asked doubtfully, "But what does the story you told have to do with what we are discussing?"

Deren nodded and continued, "Although the young master of the noble house rapidly matured while handling daily affairs, some things do not simply come up by chance. So the old noble pretending to be dead feared that the child would fail to learn certain special skills."

"What skills?" the little gnome cooperatively asked.

Deren said blandly, "For example, intrigue between nobles, secret conspiracies, bribery and espionage, thief attacks, and so on. Such matters are far more terrifying than daily affairs. Mishandle them, and the family could be destroyed outright."

"Right, things like that are common among nobles. How could a young master learn to deal with such dark affairs?" Onyxia had once infiltrated Stormwind City's noble circles, so she knew them well.

Deren continued, "The old noble's solution was to hire a team of thieves himself and have them act out noble conspiracies with the young master according to a specific script, without his knowledge. Naturally, that required the butler to serve as the chief director, ensuring both sides worked together to perform the grand play."

"Ah—" Chromie screamed. "Y-you-you... You can't possibly mean that for real, can you?!"

Onyxia's mouth hung wide open as well, too shocked to speak. Could the truth really be that simple?

Deren revealed a cold smile. "Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But does the truth matter?"

Second update. Please keep voting and bookmarking. The story will only grow more exciting! The dark curtain behind Azeroth's hidden powers will be dismantled.