Epilogue #2
“You remember that?”
“I…” He paused, examining the knowledge.
It didn’t feel like a memory, exactly. More like instinct—something encoded so deeply that it had survived even when everything else had been scattered.
“I know it. The way I know that ice expands when it freezes. The way I know that your heartbeat means safety.”
She smiled at him. “That’s oddly poetic.”
“I learned from my mate.”
“I’m not poetic.”
“You are. You simply do not notice.” He reached out to brush his fingers against her cheek, feeling the softness of her skin against his scales.
“You describe the mineral deposits like they are precious things waiting to be discovered. You talk to the equipment when you think I am not listening. You—”
“Okay, okay.” She was blushing now, which pleased him immensely. “Point taken.”
They crested a ridge, and the familiar contours of their claim spread before them.
The habitat Alina had arranged, upgraded significantly over the past few months, nestled against a rocky shelf, its environmental seals gleaming in the pale light.
The mining rig stood nearby, compact and efficient, humming with the low-grade power consumption of standby mode.
Home, he thought. Not the home of his fragmented memories, with its vast ice halls and crystalline archives. But home nonetheless.
“Another flash came while you were gone,” he said as she guided the crawler towards the habitat’s vehicle bay. “More memory.”
She glanced at him sharply. “Good flash or bad flash?”
A fair question. Some of his recovered memories brought understanding, even peace. Others brought a grief so profound it made him want to scream at the empty sky.
“Informative,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “I remembered more about the awakening process. How it was designed to work. The triggers and the sequences and the safeguards.”
“And?”
“And once the process begins, it cannot be stopped.” He watched her face for signs of fear. “The planet is waking up, Jaz. Slowly and imperceptibly by human standards, but inevitably. What GenCon is investigating may be the third emergence, or the fourth, or the tenth. There will be more.”
She was quiet as she parked the crawler and killed the engine. The silence stretched between them, filled with implications neither of them fully understood.
“The planet is waking up,” she repeated softly. “Mars. The dead planet that humanity has been trying to colonize.”
“It was never dead. Only sleeping.”
“And now it’s not.” She turned to face him fully, her amber eyes searching his. “Is that… Are you…?”
He understood what she was asking. Was he glad? Did this news fill him with hope?
“I am glad,” he said slowly, “because it means I am not the last. That whatever I was meant to preserve may still have meaning.” He reached out, cupping her face in his hands. “But it does not change what matters most.”
“What matters most?”
“You,” he said roughly. “This. What we have built together in this place. The life we are creating.” He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing in her scent—mineral dust and recycled air and the underlying sweetness that was simply her.
“I would face a thousand awakenings, ally with a hundred dragons, and fight GenCon to my last breath. But I would give it all up before I would risk losing you.”
“Adjar…”
“I know that is not reasonable. I know the survival of my kind should matter more than one small human female. I know—”
“Hey.” Her hands came up to grip his wrists. “Stop. I wasn’t objecting.”
“You were not?”
“I was going to say…” She smiled, that warm expression that had become his lodestone.
“I’m glad too. For all of it. For the planet waking up, for the other dragons, for whatever comes next.
” Her thumbs traced circles against his inner wrists.
“But we already have everything we need right here. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen, this is enough. ”
Enough.
The word settled into him like the cold—familiar and sustaining. He had spent months searching his fragmented memories for a purpose, for some sense of why he had survived when everything else had been lost. And the answer had been in front of him the whole time.
Not the archives he had been designed to protect. Not the civilization that had trusted him with its memory. Not even the other dragons who might someday emerge to stand beside him.
But with Jaz, and the life they were building, day by day, in the silence of the polar ice.
“Enough,” he agreed, and kissed her.
The wind picked up outside, sending ice crystals dancing across the windscreen.
In the distance, the rig hummed its patient song.
The sun began its slow descent towards the horizon, painting the ice purple and red.
And in the cramped cabin of a snow crawler, two figures held each other—human and dragon, prospector and keeper, mates in every sense that mattered.
She was the first to pull back, her eyes bright with an emotion she didn’t bother to hide.
“Come on,” she said, her voice husky. “Let’s go inside. I’ll make dinner, and you can tell me more about these memories. And then…”
“Then?”
Her smile turned wicked. “Then we’ll see how well that upgraded heating system handles what I have in mind.”
He laughed, a sound he was still getting used to making, and followed his mate into their home.