Chapter 82 The One True King
Skylenna
Eight Hundred and Eighty Years in the Past
Time is finally catching up to the only beast I ever believed could outrun it.
Even legends grow old, though none of us ever thought he would. Once fierce enough to take on a Dralutheran, DaiSzek now struggles to get up from his favorite spot on the dining room floor.
After decades of protecting our children, guarding our home, and comforting Dessin and I through gales of nightmares, flashbacks to the war, and debilitating seas of depression…
our boy stayed by our side through it all.
Even through one last war from an entirely other world that Sapphire asked us to fight in as one last favor to Dellilian—but that is a story for another time.
A snowy dusting of white fur overtook his chin, brows, and chest. And even in old age, though he limped from the crucial injury from the Dralutheran, DaiSzek still ran.
He’d huff and groan as Dessin took him downstream for a bath, attempting to play and knock my husband off his feet.
We brushed his shiny black fur every day, snuggled him at night in our bed, and cut up his food when he had a hard time eating.
I’ve never heard of an animal aging so gracefully. I’ve never heard of a wolf lasting longer than two decades at most.
DaiSzek has lived for more than sixty years.
After half a century, Kane and I began to believe he would live forever. That eternity flowed in his veins from the ferociousness of his bloodline.
He eventually stopped eating the finely cut meat Kane would prepare for him. The scent of lamb filling the air with its steam, untouched, sent an ache so sharp to my chest, I had to look away. The first time our sweet boy turned his head to the side to reject the meal was when I knew…
What broke my heart more was that Kane refused to accept it. He would prepare different meals. Lamb, rabbit, pheasant. Even the freshly baked blueberry muffins filled with jam that DaiSzek used to sneak off the countertop.
He’d turn his head and rest his chin on the wooden floor.
I let Kane process it without a word. His hands shook. He stared down at DaiSzek, half dissociating, half crumbling to pieces in silence.
On a Sunday morning as the sun rose behind the tree line, Dessin debated with himself in the light misting of rain. He paced down the halls of the Dellilian Castle DaiSzek once galloped through with more distress than the day we were locked up in the Vexamen Prison.
And I didn’t have to ask.
I saw the devastating conflict written across his face. The dark shadows under those stunning brown eyes. The lack of sleep weighing down on his posture.
For over an hour, Dessin debated putting DaiSzek out of his misery. And I felt that anguish deep in my soul, piercing my heart with a rusted blade.
It just so happens that DaiSzek understood this too.
He limps through the threshold of our favorite wooden door, brushes his head against my thigh, and walks outside for the first time in days.
Dessin turns to watch with the saddest, meekest glimmer of hope in his tired gaze.
But DaiSzek only looks at him briefly, a silent word that only his best friend could understand.
This morning, we walk behind DaiSzek as he ventures into the tree line to the Red Oaks.
Though, this far back into the past, there isn’t an ounce of red.
The blaze of bright green leaves soars around us.
The sky sprinkles its thin rainwater onto the moist soil.
Even the trees seem to lean in, sensing an unforgettable event is about to pass us by.
And as we come to a stop, Dessin never lets go of my hand.
“I’m scared,” I whisper to him.
“Me too, baby.”
“Maybe he’s feeling better. Maybe he wanted fresh air and a walk,” I reason.
I watch DaiSzek stand over Niles’s grave. At least, where his grave will be in nine hundred years.
I want to make time stop. To beg for a do-over with our boy. I barely made it out of a depression alive when my brother was killed. When Chekiss passed slowly, struggling to take even the smallest breath in his last weeks of being alive.
But I’ve known and loved DaiSzek since I was a little girl.
He’s covered my body with his own in the middle of a destructive storm.
He’s come to my rescue more times than I can count.
I watched him play in the rain as a pup.
I’ve endured his clumsy stage of feeling small but growing fast and bumping into us when he’d play too rough.
DaiSzek was the only family member Kane and I could rely on.
The only one alive that would never hurt us.
My grip on Dessin’s hand tightens.
DaiSzek lifts his head. Nose quivering at something he cannot see but can feel off in the distance. His ears perk up, listening to a sound that does not exactly belong to this world. The rain quiets. The leaves stop trembling. And the forest exhales as the void pulls a curtain back for me to see.
The tears come as I see her standing there, a few trees away, watching my boy.
Warmth brushes over skin like fingers made of sunlight.
A small but mighty Ginger Wrathbull standing, glowing in the honey streams of light.
Knightingale came back for him.
I throw my hand over my mouth, sobbing at the sight of DaiSzek’s tail thumping, his soft excitement seeing his old friend again.
“What is it?” Dessin asks.
I choke on my words. “It’s—Knightingale!”
Dessin releases a slow breath, clenching his jaw and watching stoically.
Knightingale wiggles and gives DaiSzek a happy chuff, calling to him.
“Oh, Dessin. I think she’s here to take him home.”
Dessin nods, though he cannot speak.
And after a moment, a tall young man steps out from the cluster of trees too. Grinning that golden boy grin we have all fallen hopelessly in love with.
Tears gush down my face as I see my brother, as young as the day I first met him in the asylum. He wears no signs of age, trauma, or ever knowing a life of pain.
“Niles. It’s Niles!” I cry out, sobbing as I grip Dessin’s arm.
I let the void pull him in, sharing my sight as clearly as I can with my husband. Dessin’s eyes widen and his chin lifts as he enters the glimpse I share.
My brother flashes his old friend that classic smile and waves to us from his place next to Knightingale.
At this, Dessin lowers his head and pinches the bridge of his nose with a slight trembling of his hand.
He’s struggling to hold himself together, but I knew that’s what does it for him.
I’ve known for a long time that Dessin never really got over losing Niles.
I could see it in his somber expression when Ruth and I would laugh at a silly memory with him.
An obnoxious thing Niles would say that wasn’t funny at the time, but after he left us, we couldn’t believe how we didn’t notice how humor poured off him relentlessly to brighten our days.
In those moments, Dessin would usually leave the room or go quiet.
And when my husband opens his eyes again to look at the serene view of his old friend waiting to welcome DaiSzek to heaven, his gaze is covered in a thick layer of tears.
The sight is a wound and a miracle holding hands.
DaiSzek lies underneath his favorite tree; the one he will dig dozens of holes around in the future, burying bones, and sleeping in its vast shade on a hot day.
And old age sheds from him like a discarded cloak as DaiSzek’s soul steps out of his body. My sweet boy gallops like a young stallion to his friends, Knightingale and Niles, who welcome him home with quiet enthusiasm.
He looks back only once.
Pausing at the edge of the heavenly light, a slow turn of his head.
Suddenly, without a strand of white speckling his fur, our lifelong protector stares into our souls with those big cinnamon eyes. Not out of obligation, but of instinct and undying love. An instinct he’s had since he was a pup. The one that urges him to make sure we are safe before he leaves.
This last look nearly brings me to my knees.
He seems to ask us not to mourn, to be safe, and that he’ll be waiting to welcome us home one day soon—all at once. I save the image of him firmly into my memory. No longer with a graying muzzle or cloudy eyes. He’s young again. And free.
I can feel their love as my long-departed family walks DaiSzek into the light glimmering through the branches.
I can feel that Niles and Knightingale will take such good care of our boy until we join him again.
And before he takes his last step from this world, I can feel his hesitation.
DaiSzek has been with us his entire life.
And this will be our first time apart. But even so, his spirit disappears.
As the light vanishes, we rush to kneel at the side of his body. I stroke the fur of his neck as tears dripped from my cheeks to the dirt.
“I love you, DaiSzek!” I cry.
The man kneeling next to me presses his forehead into his fist and sobs quietly with shaking shoulders. His large, tan hand holding DaiSzek’s limp paw.
I don’t have to see his eyes to know that man is Kane.
“He lived a long, happy life,” I assure Kane, rubbing my hand over his back.
Each small tremble of his shoulders fractures my heart. I’ve only seen Kane cry a couple of times in my entire life. His system has held themselves together so well in front of me. But losing our first baby was bound to leave us in pieces.
“I love you, Big Boy,” Kane whispers through soundless sobs. “You have gotten me through the hardest moments in my life. You’ve protected me when I was too young to protect myself. You’ve kept my wife and my children safe…”
He falls short to finish his statement as we both cry at the swift gust of memories from our long life with this beautiful beast. All the years DaiSzek protected Sapphire and Krimson.
The silent promise to die for our family if that’s what it came to.
The time he killed the Demechnef soldiers hunting us down when Dessin saved me from Albatross and Absinthe.
The long nights he’d stay awake to guard Kane and I while we slept in the forest. He was always there.
Never strayed. Always came when we’d need him most.
“I don’t know what we did to deserve you, buddy. You could have left us a long time ago, but you stuck around. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for taking care of us.”
“He waited until he was sure we were safe, Kane. Through the years on the run, being hunted down, and until the wars were over. He made sure we would be at peace before saying goodbye…”
We spend hours hugging and crying over his body that is still warm and would remain warm well into the cold night.
I’ll never forget kissing those soft ears, and the space between his eyes.
The next morning, we buried DaiSzek next to the space where his friend, Niles, will one day be buried. And we finally understood that the legends of DaiSzek, the fae king’s dragon, was wrong.
As DaiSzek’s body returned to the earth, that green on the leaves of the trees turned bright red. Like blood seeping into each branch, each twig.
It was not a dragon like the legend stated.
It was DaiSzek. Our RottWeilen.
We waited until Sapphire and Krimson came to visit us again to tell them the news. Watching them cry over his grave ripped our hearts out of our chests all over again.
The Dellilian Castle was never the same after that.
The halls lacked the soft pattering of DaiSzek’s paws as he’d run and slip through them to greet our children at the front door.
The bed no longer had that lasting warmth from when he’d sleep between my husband and me.
Yet we spoke about him every single day, keeping his memory alive and thriving.
Even over the next ten years when Dessin and I aged into our seventies…
We felt the absence of our lifelong protector. We mourned our boy that once lay with us under the shade of the red oak trees, ate bowls of blueberries until we scolded him for not sharing, and snuggled into us under the vast night sky of endless stars.
We would never be the same.
Because DaiSzek, the one true king, was gone.