“Oh, that’s not the right answer,” Darkstalker said, fanning out his wings. The gemstone crown vanished abruptly. “That answer leads to bad, bad, bad futures, Qibli.”

“No for a lot of reasons,” Qibli said. “Starting with this one: I like you, but I can’t trust you. I don’t know what you’d put in the spell on me, but if there’s a chance it could turn me evil, I don’t want to risk it. I don’t want to turn into a dragon who plays with other dragons like toys.” He nodded at the mute figure of his grandfather, perched awkwardly beside Darkstalker.

“Bad futures,” Darkstalker continued, his brows lowering, “because if you don’t accept my offer, I have to kill you. Surely you understand that.”

Qibli felt full of holes, all the way through his bones. Was he really going to die without seeing Moon again? Without knowing for sure that all his friends were safe?

Darkstalker shook his head. “You’re too much trouble if you’re not my friend. When I take the NightWing army out again, I can’t have you coming up with more clever tricks to stop me. I don’t like those futures. I also don’t like the futures where I do kill you, because Moon never forgives me. And then I have no friends, Qibli. Enchanted friends, who aren’t the same. No one to keep me good. Where do you think that leads?”

“The fact that you can’t be good on your own,” said Qibli. “That’s part of the problem. You shouldn’t need a dragon on your shoulder telling you that killing all the IceWings is wrong, or that taking over your father’s mind was an awful thing to do.”

“He deserved it!” Darkstalker hissed.

“You don’t really want that dragon on your shoulder either.” Qibli shook his head. “You wouldn’t even have listened to Clearsight if she tried to be that dragon.”

“I can do it myself,” Darkstalker said, abruptly shifting course. “See, here I go. Hey, overlords of dragon morality, I hereby acknowledge that killing Qibli would be something only an evil dragon would do. And since I’m not evil, I am not going to do that. I am going to take the high road, rip off his earring, and enchant him to be my best friend instead.”

“No, wait,” Qibli said, taking a step back into the crawl space. His bag bumped hard against his chest, ricocheting off his pounding heart. “Let’s talk about, um, moral gray areas.”

Darkstalker froze and cocked his head. “What is that?”

“The last vestiges of your soul trying to cough up a reason to let me go?” Qibli suggested.

“No, that … whirring sound.” Darkstalker shook his head like there were mosquitoes in his ears.

Qibli went quiet, listening, and for the first time felt the vibrations coming from his bag. Puzzled, he tugged it open and pulled out the old telescope-hourglass contraption he’d found in the Night Palace. To his surprise, the hourglass was spinning frantically on its axis, and it sped up as he turned the end of the telescope toward Darkstalker and Vulture.

“Where did you get that?” Darkstalker asked in a hushed voice.

“I found it in a room in your palace,” Qibli said. “What is it? Why is it spinning like that?”

Darkstalker edged forward on his outcropping and stretched his neck down toward it. Qibli held the telescope up to his eye and centered it on Darkstalker’s bewildered face.

“I made that,” Darkstalker said. “For Fathom. Such a long time ago … I mean, it doesn’t feel that long to me, but I know it was.” He squinted at the hourglass, which was still spinning. “It’s a soul reader.”

“A soul reader,” Qibli echoed.

“I made it to reassure Fathom that we were fine. That we could use our magic safely, without going evil.” His expression was curiously affectionate, as if he’d just remembered a version of Fathom he genuinely liked. “It shows how much of your soul is still good.”

The hourglass slowed, tipped one way, then the other, and finally stopped. The telescope was pointed at Darkstalker. Inside the hourglass, the bottom half was almost entirely full of white sand. In the bell of the top half, only a few grains of black sand were left.

Darkstalker stared at it, disbelief slowly crawling across his face.

“Well, that makes no sense,” he said. “Did you do something to it? Did Turtle put a new spell on it?”

“No,” Qibli said, touching the hourglass. It swayed slightly under his claws, the sand shifting but staying where it was. “I didn’t even know it was animus-touched. What does this mean?”

Darkstalker snatched the object out of Qibli’s talons and flipped it over a few times, as if looking for signs of tampering, before turning it back toward himself and squinting at the hourglass again.

“It must be broken,” he muttered. “Starting over.” He shook it vigorously for a moment and then held it out in his talons. “When this soul reader is pointed at a dragon, I enchant it to measure the good and evil in that dragon’s soul and reveal it in the drifts of sand. Black sand to mark the amount of good, white sand to show the amount of evil or damage to that dragon’s soul.”

Oh, Qibli thought. Interesting. The black sand indicates goodness — makes sense for a NightWing. He wasn’t surprised, now that he understood it, by the balance of sand in Darkstalker’s hourglass.

Darkstalker pointed the telescope at Vulture and peered through it. The hourglass obligingly began to spin, sending whirlwinds of sand dancing inside it. At last it stopped and settled into equilibrium. In the top half: a tiny sprinkling of black sand, about the same as Darkstalker’s. In the bottom half, a correspondingly large pile of glittering white sand.

“Now that’s logical,” Darkstalker muttered. “He’s obviously terrible. So it’s working now.” He frowned down at the soul reader, inhaled deeply and pointed the end of the telescope at himself.

Shrum shrum shrum. The hourglass tumbled busily.

It slowed to a stop. As before, the mountain of white sand in the bottom was large, almost large enough to overflow the bulb. And in the top half shone those last few tiny grains of black sand.

“But that’s impossible!” Darkstalker exploded. He threw the soul reader away from him violently, and Qibli lunged to catch it before it shattered on the stone floor.

“I protected my soul!” Darkstalker cried. Veins were starting to throb in his neck, writhing like livid snakes under his scales. “First with my scroll, and now with my wristband! I shouldn’t have lost any of it!”

“And yet it looks like you’ve lost almost all of it,” Qibli pointed out.

He was shocked to see how much this upset Darkstalker. The ancient NightWing seemed to swell to twice his normal enormous size. His wings were flared and twitching wrathfully.

“No!” Darkstalker slammed his tail into the crevasse wall, unleashing a scamper of loud pebbles. “I’m not like other animus dragons. I’m smarter than they are. My soul is safe from my magic! That can’t be what it looks like!”

“Safe from your magic, maybe,” Qibli said. “But not safe from your actions.”

“WHAT?” Darkstalker roared.

Qibli squared his shoulders and held his ground, although the expression on Darkstalker’s face kind of made him want to retreat all the way back into the crawl space.

“You didn’t lose your soul because magic ate it away slowly,” Qibli said. “You lost it because you chose to do terrible things, over and over again. Each terrible thing, each betrayal, each murder, added to this mountain.” He tapped the white sand side. “That’s not the magic’s fault. That’s you. That’s who you chose to be.”

“But — I had good reasons for everything I did,” Darkstalker said. “Visions of a good future. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Yes, sometimes,” Qibli agreed. “But not when your choices are so dark and damaging. Not when there were better alternatives you didn’t even explore.”

“Blah blah blah,” Darkstalker muttered, but he was staring into space now. “Who … that’s not possible … is it? Where does that go? How does it end?” He twisted his neck around to look above and behind him. “Can you see what I’m seeing? Come on out; I’ve obviously known you were there since you crawled down here.”

There was a pause, and then a ripple in the rocks overhead, whorls of yellow and blue suddenly appearing on the gray and spreading into the shape of a dragon who was covering the shape of another dragon clinging to the small claw holds in the wall.

“Huh,” said Darkstalker. “Actually, I didn’t know she was there.” He jerked his chin at Kinkajou as she peeled herself off Moon. The RainWing shot a glare at him and fluttered down to sit beside Qibli. A moment later, Moon landed on his other side, and even though this meant the three of them were crowded together in the small space, Qibli was finally able to breathe.

“Hello, Darkstalker,” Moon said.

“Can you see this vision?” he asked, reaching down toward her. Qibli shivered as Moon rested her talon in the giant NightWing’s palm.

She closed her eyes for a long moment.

“Isn’t that strange?” Darkstalker said. “It’s so blurred, and it ends in darkness. Is someone going to betray me again? But no one’s magic can hurt me anymore. And who? Did you see her? She looks like … but she can’t be.”

“If it was her,” said Moon, opening her eyes again, “would you take that path? Even knowing it ends in possible darkness, would you do it to see her again?”

A light was kindling in Darkstalker’s eyes. “But — do you —” He stopped, his claws gripping the stone. “Yes. Of course I would.”

“Then let’s see where this path leads,” Moon said, tipping her snout up to the sky.

Darkstalker spread his wings and paused. He leaned over to Vulture, tapped his head, and whispered something. Qibli’s grandfather vanished again, as suddenly as he’d appeared.

Then Darkstalker took off, aiming for the crack of sky overhead. Qibli exhaled with relief. This was not his final resting place, after all. He would live to see another sunrise, although he wasn’t sure he could count on more than one.

“Come on, we have to keep up,” Kinkajou said, leaping aloft. Her wings looked like flower petals on a river as she flashed away across the gray stone.

But Moon stopped one of Qibli’s wings with her own before he could follow suit.

“I heard all that,” she said, looking at him searchingly. “Why did you say no to his offer?”

“Did you want me to say yes?” he asked. “So I could be more special? Like you? I know, it’s what I’ve wished for a hundred times. I just … if I’d been born an animus, that would be one thing. But I couldn’t accept it as a gift from him. It wouldn’t be safe. And I wouldn’t know if I was myself anymore.” He glanced down at the soul reader. “That much power … it would change me. And I’m not sure it would change me in ways I would like. Or, um … ways you would like.”

“Qibli,” she said so fiercely that he flinched. Was she going to tell him to change his mind? To chase after Darkstalker and beg for the magic, after all?

Moon seized his talons in hers. “How are you so brilliant and such an idiot at the same time? You are special. You don’t need his poisoned magic, or any magic. You’re smart and you’re brave and you care and you don’t give up and you take all of that and use it to help other dragons instead of yourself. That’s better than magic. You did the right thing.”

“I did?” he said.

“Hey, swooning friends!” Kinkajou shouted from far overhead. “Am I defeating Darkstalker by myself today? Don’t you at least want to come watch?”

Moon laughed and let go of Qibli.

“Time to fly,” she said, and they did.