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aligning some rocks and destroying a small dam on the stream.
     
    He'd spent enough hours here. He stretched his wings to fly, and kicked off up into the twilight, riding the last thermals of the dying day, using his magics to multiply their effect. He flew up, up into the thinner air. Far below Tasmarin's endless lacework of sea and islands stretched out to the sunset. When he got high enough he could see the other dragons flying up, distant shapes against the purple of night-fall.
     
    It was something of a conceit having the seat of the conclave in the sky, far above the world below. Fionn rather liked it.
     
    It also meant that it was a place no lesser life-form could ever reach. Even if they had the magic to assist the flight and infall, none but a dragon could manage the airlessness.
     
    Fionn always thought that particular aspect of the conceit something of a delusion. But then, he smiled to himself, dragons were prone to delusions. He could think of several mechanical means, let alone magical ones, of achieving the trick.
     
    As moons went, this one was an unimpressive thing, and it took a fair amount of bending of the laws of physics to keep it up here, so close that the great rock was almost in the atmosphere of Tasmarin.
     
    It was not a very stable arrangement. But then, neither was the plane of dragons that was this world. The plane that dragonkind had carved out for themselves had all the permanency and stability of a hen's egg balanced on the small end, on a sow's back. A drunken sow, at that. Fionn felt that it was fitting that the conclave should be held in a place equally frail.
     
    The guardian towers were all visible from up here. Six great bastions on the edges of the world . . .
     
    Fionn smiled wickedly to himself. There had been seven for many years. Soon there'd be five. And after that the fall would be fast.
     
    He spiraled in to land at the gates of the conclave. He'd bet that they didn't even remember that it had been he who, all those long years ago, had arranged for air to breathe up here. Dragons could cope without it, but it did limit conversation to pointing and hitting. That was fine if you were the biggest dragon with the longest and the most powerful tail, but Fionn wasn't. Talk opened far more opportunities for making size a slightly less relevant factor in winning arguments. Not that talk counted for too much. Among dragons, size was really what counted most.
     
    Fionn furled his wings and walked in through the portal. The great cave was full this evening. Dragons were normally solitary creatures. They mated and parted. Young dragons were hatched and reared by the mother. And she didn't keep the young past learning to speak and fly. It had created the isolation that had made the all-powerful dragons victims to other species that did organize. They maintained they did not need others . . . but the conclave gave them something that they'd lacked hitherto: a place to brag. And that had, to some extent, socialized them. Fionn grinned at them all, long sharp teeth showing, which of course was normal for dragons. With the amount of hot air being produced here tonight, he needn't have bothered with providing an atmosphere. He sauntered slowly through the vast, dragon-crowded cavern. More than one dragon drew their wings aside, as if fearing contamination. Fionn thought that that was pretty funny too, all things considered. He found himself a position near one of the magma vents and sat down to listen. He had very keen ears—keener than the others realized, and he had discovered that if he was patient enough all the news and all the rumors in this place would eventually come to him.
     
    Listening in: It was the usual soup of plots and counterplots. Of petty fights and shifting alliances. Of ineffectual plans to do something about the destroyed guardian-tower. They'd been at that one for the last seventeen years, and were still no further on. They weren't much good at admitting