Chapter 26
Azar
I’ve never fit in.
With the flame blessed, I was the strange one who didn’t want to kill and consume others to grow larger and stronger.
With the earth blessed, I alone was gold, and I was larger, stronger, and never felt compelled to take a mate.
As a hatchling, I spent most of my time hiding who I really was, and the rest of the time feeling like I didn’t fit into either version of myself.
I finally understand why.
I was still hiding a large part of who I am, and that’s not flame or earth blessed. It’s not any one particular branch. I’m a child of the sky.
“No,” Liz says, shaking her head. You’re not a child of the sky. She’s clearly listening in to my thoughts as I portal my people to Seattle. You’re the king of the sky.
It took us a few hours to find a bright for each of the blessed, once my father stopped arguing over what Liz and I should do. Once he acceded that I was more powerful, he seemed almost relieved not to be in charge of all our people’s future anymore.
Once the blessed were all bonded, I opened a portal, but not to war-torn Seattle to battle the vanir. I open a portal to Portland, a few hours south.
“Dude, I know you’re like, shiny, and all,” Liz whispers. “But you messed up. This isn’t Seattle.”
The blessed are much more obedient than my own mate, thankfully. They all shoot through the portal, even if they are a little confused about the location I chose. Once the last one has gone through—my brother Hyperion—I close the portal.
“What was that?” Liz asks. “You sent them all there. . .why?”
So we could do this. I portal Liz and myself to Seattle, just beside the West Point Lighthouse, close to Seattle, but far away from any human dwellings or businesses.
“Whoa,” she ducks as a storm vanir shoots by, talons extended, swooping to try and grab a human from the sidewalk below.
You will all stop, I broadcast. And you will report to the edge of the water immediately.
None of the vanir listen, of course. They’re too busy following the orders they got from their acknowledged leader, probably Bjorn. I wonder how Freya dealt with the guilt of imprisoning her own father for thousands of years in a volcano of misery.
Who are you?
I wheel around, still a little amazed at the force generated by my new, tremendously large wings flapping slowly to hold us aloft. It’s a very large, very angry looking blue dragon, and I’m guessing it’s—
“Bjorn,” Liz says. “I can’t say I’m pleased to see you again.”
He scowls.
“I’m Gullveig reborn, your daughter Freya’s bonded, but alive again in a different time and place.”
Without a word, he strikes, shooting a funnel of ice right at us.
I melt it without a second thought.
He fires off another.
I sigh this time, melting it so forcefully that it turns into vapor and blows back into his face. I can do this all day. Whenever you’re ready to talk, let me know.
Bjorn was never the smartest, to hear Liz talk about him, but he only tries a few more times before he bellows, Who are you?
“You’ve heard of Veralden Radien,” Liz shouts. “He killed him.” She tosses her head. “So I guess you could say ‘he’s your daddy.’” She grins.
Bjorn roars again, and this time he flies straight at me, claws extended. He’s more like our father than I wish were the case.
I may have to kill him.
Probably, Liz says.
But just as he’s about to slam into us, I pull, hard, snaking his magic away. I hadn’t realized I could even do that, but since I sort of stole Veralden Radien’s essence, I suppose what he gave, I can take away.
Bjorn, deprived of his innate abilities, his gift from the sky, flaps his wings desperately and still plummets into the ocean below. Liz laughs as he crashes. “I guess it’s not just your wings that enable you all to fly.”
It’s at least half magic, I say. As you could probably already tell from our speed.
“Yeah, sure,” she says. “I could tell. I know things about velocity and stuff.” She looks downward, and she smiles, broadly. “Okay, this is really, super fun.”
Below us, Bjorn’s thrashing around in the water, barely keeping his head above the waves.
“No one taught him to swim, and I bet he’s wishing they had.”
The next wave of vanir wind up the same place as Papa Bjorn, as Liz keeps calling him, and then the wave of aggressors after that.
But sometime around the fourth or fifth group that comes to attack me, they start to realize that I can de-magic them, and they don’t want to join the others in dragon soup.
“That’s right.” Liz has taken to flying slowly back and forth above then, shouting nonsense. “Bob for apples, little babies.”
I can’t help snorting a little. She’s a stunning creature, especially now that she glows a startling gold from the life force Jore gifted to her. It takes us nearly an hour more to get the vanir to listen, and then we reroute them back up north to the evacuated areas.
It won’t be fast, but I believe we can rehabilitate most of the vanir. It took me time to understand the importance of the bond between earth and sky children, and I believe they can learn the benefits of it, too.
“That was well done,” Liz says. “But I still don’t think you’re going to be able to reform Bjorn.”
I’m worried she’s right, but we have time. He won’t regain his magic until he changes. And if he can’t change, he’ll perish without it. Unlike the earth children, without our magic, the vanir and the aesir can’t survive here on earth.
I portal us back to the Northern Territory.
“Is this where you want to live, now?” Liz asks. “Are the schools here any good? Do you know?”
I blink. The what?
“Well, if I’m going to be having a baby at some point, we’ll need to make sure the schools here are good.”
A baby? I can’t help my confusion. Do you mean a hatchling?
She laughs. “Gosh, I hope not. I’m not a dragon.”
But I am.
“Listen up, sir.” She taps my shoulder where she’s sitting. “You certainly weren’t a dragon when you fathered this. . .” She coughs. “Oh, no. What if it is an egg?” She flaps her wings, floating away from her seat on my back. “What if I go as nuts as your mother?”
Don’t do that, I complain. If you’re riding me, ride me. If you’re flying, then fly.
She’s ignoring me entirely, flying in small circles over the home that Gordon’s hard at work trying to repair.
Liz.
She freezes, and when she looks at me, she looks terribly upset.
What’s wrong?
Her eyes well with tears and she starts to sob. She’s now hovering over our ruined home, bawling.
It’s okay, I say. I’ll help Gordon, and we can repair it quickly. The wall will be no problem, but if it’s taking too long, I’m sure the other earth blessed will—
“Rufus should be here to help.” She begins to cry harder. Her wings beat frantically, blowing debris from Gordon’s partial wall demolition in tiny circles all over the already messy floor. “It would be repaired so much faster if he were here.”
Gordon freezes. His tiny, almost non-essential shoulders slump. That’s when I realize that Sammy’s on his back, and he collapses across Gordon, hugging him.
“Oh, no.” Liz must have just realized the same thing. She lost her mother and we lost Rufus within a very close span, and there hasn’t been time to grieve any of it. “We’ll hold a funeral.” Her head whips toward me. “Thunar?” She wipes at her eyes. “Should we include him?”
Definitely not, Gordon says. Good riddance.
I can’t argue with that.
While Gordon and I work furiously on the repairs of the residence, Liz and the children put together the details of this human ritual, the funeral. Apparently it’s where earth children obsess over the loss of the ones who died so that they can feel better about the loved one being gone forever.
I don’t understand, Gordon says. What are they doing exactly?
I can’t quite grasp it myself, I say. And Liz’s mother was not the best, so I’m not sure why she’s so bent on doing it.
Sammy says she was the best, Gordon says. Until she just wasn’t. I think the return of the blessed was harder for some humans than others, and she was one of the ones who took it the hardest.
I suppose if the vanir showed up and started taking our things and pushing us around, I’d have handled that poorly.
We finish the repairs to the residence quite a while before the funeral’s ready. Apparently it involves contacting Liz’s father and her mother’s friends, and then planning on a way to somehow bury her body.
Which leads us back to the question Liz first asked when we portaled back, before she began bawling uncontrollably.
Humans place a lot of significance on the location of the bodies of their deceased relatives. Even though worms are going to eat it, and it’s going to rot? Gordon looks disgusted. I can’t eat those grubs, either.
I should hope not. Liz says they visit the places where the dead body has been placed in the dirt.
Why? Gordon looks even more disturbed. Do humans grow back in the place you plant them?
Now I’m laughing, but I’m not sure why. I think it’s just a place where they think about them more.
They bury them deep down? Gordon asks.
I plan to make sure of it, I say. I’d hate for one of us to inadvertently tunnel through her mother’s rotting remains. Speaking of, we should talk to the earth blessed about this human custom called cemeteries.
Eventually, all the relevant human pieces are in place, and Gordon and I have done our best to prepare Rufus’ friends for the protocols of a human funeral.
At first, we merely walk past photos of the deceased—not many of Rufus, and the ones we have are very, very small—and then we look at flowers and listen to music.
I’m not sure why the humans do any of this, but a lot of them are leaking, so it makes them feel things.
Eventually, a human I don’t know gets up and talks about where humans go when they die.
Liz did not tell me about this heaven place, I say.
But after hearing about it, I don’t mind the idea. Gordon looks pleased. I’m sure Rufus has found many squirrels there.