Amos slept.

His rest was light and fitful, harassed by dreams and memories. Demons from his past rose again and again, falling into ice only to melt themselves free. They harassed him, but they could not defeat him. He was, after all, the eldest dragon alive. Even if he hadn't been before, he certainly was now. He was, perhaps, the only one left.

At least, he had thought so. Then the surge of power from the south where the humans had fled. The winds brought back to him the scent of flowers and trees in fruit-Eve. Always Eve, still plodding along with her pathetic human children.

Amos snarled and snapped, rousing briefly from his rest. He opened his eyes only to darkness. Thousands of years he had spent in study and training, building the massive reserves of power that had allowed him to bring about this fate to the world. Not that it had been his original intention, no. In the beginning he had only amassed such power for the sake of knowledge and to protect those under his care.

All that power, and he had not been able to hold onto his beloved.

Bitter rage warring with grief welled up in his throat like emotional bile. He bit back the keen of grief that tried to burst from him, burying it in the icy dungeon he had built around the shards of his heart.

Amos cast a thread of power to the winds and called them. At first there was nothing, and he was pleased. Glimpses of fields of ice as far as the eye could see-the smell of sleet and wind, the sounds of the crack and groan of glaciers. Then the farther winds began to reach him.

He saw tiny pockets the ice had not managed to seal. They were dead and barren-fine. He did not like such cracks, but they held only dust and the skeletons of trees. A stranger glimpse almost fluttered too quickly past his eyes, but he caught it and held it with all his will. Here was a riot of vegetation, long dead now but so strange that it should not have existed at all. He tasted that breeze, sampled the dust that floated in it and tasted the faintest tang of dragon's blood.

So Eve had spilled her blood here.

Why, he did not know. He had touched her mind briefly around the time this happened, he thought. Caught a glimpse of dying human boys, children she had adopted.

Meaningless.

Images continued flitting around him, bring glimpses the world. For a while, he was satisfied with his progress. It wasn't complete, surely. The farther south the breezes came from the more dissatisfied he became. The gaps in the ice became larger. Then he began to see signs of life. A few squirrels, a nest of birds.

Then humans. There they were, huddled on the edge of the sea in breaks in the ice like warts upon the world. Their lines held fish smoking over fires, and damned if he didn't hear the squalling of infants. In rage, he lifted his claws and shredded the wind that brought the image.

The fit left him exhausted. He collapsed back to the stone floor of his cavern. Amos wanted this place entombed, much like he was. Oh, perhaps he was not physically encased in ice yet, but since the day he had lost his mate, he had been dead where it counted. Every good thing had died with her-or should have, he thought. And now everything, good or not, would follow her. Then he could rest for eternity.