Chapter 6 Zephyros
Zephyros
The nightmare comes again, as it has a thousand times since she vanished.
Zephyros sees Rhealyn standing at the edge of the plateau, her dark hair whipping in the wind.
She turns to look at him, those hazel eyes wide with terror.
Then she falls, plummeting through empty air.
His wings snap open, and he dives, talons outstretched toward his rider—his little one—but she slips through his grasp like smoke.
Her body strikes the ground below. The earth trembles, splits, and consumes her.
Gone.
Zephyros crashes into the unyielding stone, digging his obsidian claws into soil that suddenly feels like granite. He roars in anguish, tearing at the earth, but it heals faster than he can break it. The ground mocks him with its solidity, as if Rhealyn had never existed at all.
Give her back! His mental cry echoes into emptiness.
Zephyros wakes with a violent start, scales scraping against the stone walls of his lair. The hollow within Sky’s Edge feels too small suddenly, too confining.
The pain of separation burns through him like poison. Millennia of existence, and he’s never felt a bond go completely silent yet remain somehow intact. She lives. He knows this with absolute certainty, feels her presence like a phantom limb, tantalizingly close yet impossible to reach.
Zephyros unfurls his wings in the darkness of his cave. The scar over his right eye throbs with remembered pain. What use is all his power if he’s never able to protect those who matter?
Sleep will not return now. It never does after the nightmare.
He slumps back onto his bed of worn stone, eyes fixed on the cave entrance where the first hint of dawn light creeps in.
Another day without her. Another day of waiting, searching the skies for any sign, testing the strange link between them that still remains.
The memories of Hearthdale still haunt him. For six long months, Zephyros perched atop the Flametop Mountains, a vigilant statue against the changing sky. His talons carved new notches into ancient stone as he watched the endless procession of riders and their dragons searching the cave systems.
Fools. All of them.
He watched their methodical explorations with contempt burning in his ancient gaze.
They plumbed every dark recess with torches and instruments, mapped every winding tunnel with their careful measurements, documented every hollow chamber with their endless charts and diagrams—as if Rhealyn might be found simply napping peacefully in some forgotten corner of the caverns.
As if the power that had claimed her, that had swallowed her whole, was something so mundane, so ordinary that it could possibly be tracked by their primitive human means.
Their ignorance of the ancient forces at work was pitiable.
Yet Vaylen, with his relentless determination, earned a grudging measure of respect from Zephyros.
The High Prime drove himself beyond exhaustion, pushing deeper into the mountain than any other, refusing to abandon the search even when others faltered.
Zephyros had to acknowledge, however reluctantly, that the human male truly cared for Rhealyn.
His desperation mirrored Zephyros’s own, though filtered through the limited understanding of a creature whose life was but a blink compared to a dragon’s existence.
The riders tried, but their dragons understood better, casting sorrowful glances toward him as he maintained his lonely vigil. Only they could comprehend the torment of feeling a bond that still pulsed with life yet led nowhere.
When winter came, blanketing the landscape in snow and ice, Zephyros remained. The frozen winds that would have killed any human merely reminded him of colder ages he had survived. But as spring thawed the land and summer burned the valleys green, his restlessness grew unbearable.
One night, as the stars wheeled overhead, Zephyros unfurled his wings and left the mountains behind. Not because hope had abandoned him—but because something deep within called him back to Sky’s Edge. Perhaps in the place where their bond first formed, he might feel closer to her.
Now, the familiar plateau surrounds him, the same winds caress his scales, but the emptiness remains. Distance, he has learned, means nothing. Whether perched on that peak or lying in his lair, the bond connecting him to Rhealyn remains equally tangible and equally unreachable.
—Wherever you are, he thinks toward that ghostly bond, know that I have not forgotten. I will never forget.
Suddenly, a cry splinters through Zephyros like lightning striking a barren tree—raw, unexpected, excruciating.
—Zephyros!
Rhealyn’s voice—unmistakable even after a year’s absence—rips through his mind. Pain follows, not his but hers, burning along their bond like molten metal. His massive body convulses, his tail scraping stone as his muscles contract involuntarily.
—Rhealyn!
He lurches to his feet, slamming his massive head against the cavern ceiling. Rock fragments shower down, scattering across his scales like insignificant raindrops. The pain registers distantly, nothing compared to the psychic shockwave reverberating through his consciousness.
—Rhealyn! His call thunders through their fully reawakened bond.
The world tilts. His vision blurs, doubles, then splits entirely. Through his own eyes, he sees the dim interior of his lair, dawn light creeping through the entrance. Through hers, impenetrable darkness, absolute and consuming. The disorientation nearly buckles his legs.
Then movement. Soil and stone tumbling past in a chaotic rush as if she’s being expelled from an earthy womb. Her overwhelming terror floods their connection. Zephyros roars, the sound echoing through Sky’s Edge, startling sleeping dragons from their slumber.
Blinding light explodes across Zephyros’s and Rhealyn’s shared vision. The sun—so long denied—sears into eyes unaccustomed to its brilliance. Pain lances through them both. He feels her legs give way, the impact of knees striking ground, the cool brush of grass against her palms.
And after that, nothing. The connection goes slack as consciousness abandons her.
Zephyros scrambles out of his lair, exiting through a hole on the side of Sky’s Edge. Unfurling his wings to their full span, his timeless heart thundering like war drums, he takes to the sky and climbs, climbs, climbs, beating his wings.
—She has returned!
Exultation courses through him like wildfire across a parched plain. His roar cleaves the morning air, a thunderous declaration that reverberates through Sky’s Edge. The plateau trembles beneath the force of his joy, dust and pebbles cascading from his weathered face.
Atop the plateau, dragons and their freshly minted Skyriders halt their preparations.
Their heads snap upward, witnessing his explosive ascent.
Some of the younger riders shrink back, instinctively afraid, while the dragons themselves tilt their heads in curiosity at this display from one who has been nothing but a brooding shadow for an entire year.
Zephyros pays them no heed. His wings beat powerfully against the currents, each stroke carrying him westward toward Hearthdale, toward the land that took his rider and has now, inexplicably, returned her.
—Wait for me. I’m coming for you.
His thoughts race along their reforged bond, seeking her consciousness. Whether she hears him doesn’t matter. The connection burns bright once more, a beacon guiding him across leagues of forests and fields.
After endless darkness, dawn has finally broken.