The sea dragon shrugged one shoulder. “My duties mean I don’t have need to meet with other types of shifter all that often,” she said, sounding a little regretful. “When I do, people just tend to refer to me by the literal translation of my name. Third
Dancer of the Mirrored Void.”
“Um,” Neridia said, cautiously. “Is there a short form of that?”
Third Dancer of the Mirrored Void laughed. “That is the short form. My full name is rather longer.” Her turquoise eyes brightened. “But you could give me an air name!”
“Me? Why me? Can’t you just pick one for yourself?”
“Oh, no.” The sea dragon looked shocked at the suggestion. “Names have to be given, not taken. And air-names can only be given by land-dwellers. I was terribly jealous of my little brother when he won his. Ever since I was a little hatchling listening to fairy tales, I always dreamed of walking the fantastical lands above the waves.”
“Why didn’t you?” Neridia asked.
“It is not permitted. The Sea Council says we can’t risk too much interaction with the dry-landers, for fear of another Dragon War. Very few of us ever walk the land.” She clasped her hands together, fixing Neridia with entreating eyes. “I never thought I’d have the chance to win an air name. Please, please give me one!”
“Well…okay.” Neridia quailed at the thought of trying to come up with a name worthy of the strong, vibrant woman. “Um, do you have a preference?”
The sea dragon’s forehead furrowed seriously. “I would like something that matches my brother’s, so that everyone will be able to tell that we are family. Is there a female form of his name?”
“Jane Doe, I guess,” Neridia said dubiously. “But I’m not sure it really-“
“Jane Doe,” the sea dragon said, with great satisfaction. “How exotic. Yes. I shall be Jane.”
Neridia rubbed her forehead, biting back a groan.
I just named a fifty-foot-long sea dragon Jane.
Oh well. At least she seems happy about it.
“I cannot wait to tell my little brother that I have my own air name now.” Jane danced over to Neridia’s side, peering out the window herself. She sighed. “Though I suppose I will have to wait awhile yet. No doubt all the knights of every Order will have their jaws full quelling this pandemonium.”
Neridia stared from the sea dragon to the peaceful city below, and back again. “What pandemonium?”
Jane looked at her in surprise. “I am sorry, I didn’t realize human eyesight was so much poorer than ours. Can you not make out the hordes thronging the Sun Plaza?”
Neridia followed the dragon’s pointing finger. The air bubble surrounding the tower also covered a wide circular area just outside the palace gates, about the twice the area of a football pitch. There was no doubt that it was the Sun Plaza—thousands of golden tiles set into the gleaming white paving formed a huge circle with intricate, spiraling rays.
It was quite easy to make out the design, given that the vast space was mostly empty. There were quite a few scattered groups of people milling around, but it was hardly what she’d call a scene of pandemonium. The plaza could easily have accommodated a crowd ten times the size.
“You mean those people down there?” Neridia asked Jane, wondering if maybe she was missing something.
“Yes! Have you ever seen such a crowd? If there are this many in the Sun Plaza alone, most of the city must be out in the streets!”
Neridia did a quick head count and estimate, just in case she was being misled by the size of the plaza. But she still couldn’t come up with more than a couple hundred people, at the very most.
She looked back at Jane. “You’ve lived in Atlantis all your life, right?”
“Yes. Many sea shifters prefer to reside in the deeps, saying that the city is much too crowded and busy for comfort, but I like being where everything happens.”
“And…how many people live here?”
“Oh, a great many,” Jane said earnestly. “Though most divide their time between the city and the open ocean. There are sometimes as many as three thousand people residing here!”
There were three thousand residents just in Neridia’s tiny home village. Inverness, the nearest city, had forty thousand people, and she knew that Londoners considered it to be a rural backwater.
Neridia stared out at the crowded tiers of buildings dropping away to the distant sea floor. “There are only three thousand sea dragons in this entire city?”
Jane looked startled. “No, of course not. Most of the residents are other types of shifter, of course.” She sighed. “We are not as numerous as we once were.”