The light and heat were still draining from the dry savanna air. But even as the world grew darker, Kera could see that the bloodstain coloring the bandages around Virgil’s abdomen had grown ever larger.

  “No, I’m sure we’re at least five miles further west, still,” Reglus said to one of the other sergeants, where they stood pouring over a map in the light of the campfire. “We’d have already passed over the trail again by now, if we were that far east. No, we certainly would’ve seen it…”

  Kera squirmed over onto the other side on her bedroll, facing away from the camp.

  “You must… try and sleep, Ker,” Virgil whispered.

  “I could say the same,” she whispered back. “Gods above, Virgil, I saw what the shells from that airship did to Decia… it's a miracle you’re still conscious.”

  “Do not… think of Decia. It was instant… she felt no pain. She gave her life for Setet.”

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  Kera nodded. Her eyelids wet as they came together.

  “No, it's not that,” said Reglus. “It’s because Iumatar kept moving after she sent up the first flare. Yes, we scattered on three fifty-five, then cut west two eighty for fifteen seconds. Then I curved west southwest two fifty for three minutes, then turned northeast bearing fifteen when I saw the flare. But she was already a good way northwest…”

  The stars above made Kera feel so small.

  “What’s on… your mind?” said Virgil, before convulsing through a weak, wet cough. “Pay no heed to Reglus while he’s… under stress…”

  She couldn’t stop the tears, then.

  “It’s not really that,” Kera sniffled back. “I’m just… scared, Virgil. For you, for one. And about what — what’s even happening?”

  For a long time, Virgil said nothing. Kera started to worry he’d fallen unconscious, or worse, before he heard her his bedroll crinkle again.

  “We’re under attack,” he rasped. “And the problem… isn’t from… the set of contexts… we thought problems could come from.”

  He managed a weak shrug.

  “That's how it got Decia, that's how it got me. Now, just… don’t let it get you too.”

  "[A] Dragon king is a double metaphor for an event that is both extremely large in size or effect (a "king") and born of unique origins (a "dragon") relative to its peers (other events from the same system)."

  Wikipedia

  the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."

  Iain M. Banks