22

There was a disorienting feel as I stepped over the threshold and I entered into a large, dimly lit room that looked like any number of cliche'd dungeon studies. The bricks were a dark red and brown, and oil lights set on brass poles just above my eye level. In the center of the room was a circular dark-colored rug with a reading desk and chair on it. Along the floor just off the edge of the rung was a double circle with a series of unfamiliar designs resting between the inner and outer circle.
There were two three-step ladders for reaching the upper shelves of the book cases that started on the left side of the entrance, and went all the way around the walls to the right side of the entrance. The bookshelves weren't totally packed, but there were a LOT of books, and there was a stack by the desk that someone had left out apparently. Knowing Cobb, the books would be on Anolyn.
I didn't dive into the stack, but went around the room looking at the titles. Most of the books were in languages that I had no idea what they were. I took one off a shelf at random and leafed through it. The writing was done by someone with a very spidery hand, the characters were tall and thin, and completely illegible.
Frustrated, I went back to the desk and picked up the top book n the stack and opened it. It was in perfectly legible English. I went through the books, and all the others in the stack over the next two days. All of them had some account about dragons and some specific about anolyn, but nothing that was fact, all were presented as stories and the few that had facts were about dragons about three thousand years ago, the height of the previous magical period.
What I gleaned from all of this was what you probably know yourself from playing those table top games. Dragons are big, bad, extremely magickal, highly intelligent, utterly ruthless. Not much for two days? Well consider that along with this, dragons have weaknesses. Any silver weapon will cut their hide, any weapon for that matter will. You just have to survive to get close enough to do it. Bullets will penetrate, bullets will kill a dragon IF you hit them in the right place.
Trouble is the right place is different for each dragon. Remember magick? Dragons are, according to the few ancient texts, born with the ability to focus their whole life force into one or more places in their body. The adults help the young practice this ability. What it means is that if you have the world's greatest sniper with the biggest baddest rifle around, he may blow the dragon's head half-off with a shot into the eye. But everything will just grow back in mere seconds and you will have a VERY pissed off dragon coming for you.
That is one thing I never want to have happen to me. Dragons are also apparently very creatively vindictive to people that upset them. One story had one taking a man apart, de-boning him over a period of four days before eating him. No, I really did not want that to happen to me. If I was going to do this, I needed a way to bypass the purported alarms that Anolyn had up, and find some way to hide from him so the way could start running people back off of Prince Edward Island.
I had to get in without being discovered, get back out again, go in and find someone who wanted to escape, and help them escape. It wasn't enough to get in and out, it had to be repeatable. Once I could do that, and prove it to Cobb, my service would be done. The smart thing however, is to make sure you've found everything you can before trying something this crazy.