Chapter 21 #2
Each day passes in a fog of misery and blood.
Battles rage around me, and I slaughter dozens, hundreds of soldiers, and Nilak’s pristine scales grow caked with blood and viscera.
Her teeth and claws have never rended so much flesh.
We are mindless participants. We are given battle orders, and we fulfil them with careless violence.
My insides feel like they have been replaced by cogs and pulleys, and someone else is yanking on the ropes.
I barely understand who our enemy is. At first we all believed that Grendu invaded Maledin, breaking a hundreds-year-old peace treaty between our two powerful nations, but it becomes clear that the interlopers are no sorcerers at all. They’re something else entirely.
We are fighting the Brethren Guard, an army of soldiers accompanied by mages. Though we are vastly outnumbered, we have an advantage in that we have dragons, and they do not.
Commander Zabriel fights with single-minded focus and apparently an enviably clear mind, and though I have ceased to care about the outcome of this war to reclaim our homeland, I’m surprised to discover that we are winning it.
We are regaining ground. Barracks, fortresses, and monasteries fall to the dragon army, until the day dawns when all that is left to conquer is Lenhale itself.
I am standing with Nilak, awaiting the command for the invasion, her head on my shoulder, while I silently apologize for not having the energy or strength to clean her beautiful scales.
She tells me she is too heartsick to care.
She misses Minta. She misses the dragongrounds and the safety of the flare.
King Alastor is dead. He fled Lenhale and was killed.
Apparently he was some kind of puppet king for another ruler called the Shadow King.
I don’t understand, and I don’t care. All I can think is that I am going to have to return to Lenhale and see what the interlopers have done to my city and the dragongrounds.
Yet I cannot return because Commander Zabriel wishes to see the dead king for himself, and there he finds a woman.
For the first time I have awoken in this new and hateful era, I feel something.
Indignant, incandescent rage.
Zabriel has lost his head over some silly little human who somehow manages to slip through his fingers.
There is no triumphant return to Lenhale.
There is no glorious celebration of our victory.
There is only the wreckage that we have wrought across our homeland, and fear in the people’s eyes as we arrive in the capital.
We have returned like ghosts from the past and ripped away everything that’s familiar.
They hate us.
They forgot us, and so as unfair as it may be, I hate them in return.
Our dragons are mistrustful and restless.
The castle is deserted and in disrepair.
The dragongrounds are overgrown with weeds.
The nesting caves are filled with bats. The puppet king has not cared for this once magnificent place.
The castle and grounds are dirty and disheveled.
The once beautiful gardens, so favored by the queen, are overgrown with weeds.
I am sent away from Lenhale on countless missions pursuing fleeing bands of Brethren Guard or breaking the sieges on monasteries. Most nights I’m so exhausted that I don’t recall lying down on my pallet. I wake in the morning with no memory of how I got there.
A band of men calling themselves witchfinders surrenders to me.
They are ragged, petrified, and sickly men, and they say something about being drugged into submission by the Brethren and forced to persecute the witches of Maledin.
I don’t understand what a witchfinder is, and neither do I care.
As they swear they have never raised a sword against the commander’s army, I tell them to go to Lenhale and seek pardon from Commander Zabriel.
When I point out the direction, they trail off toward the capital.
They’re so weak and pathetic that I’m sure they will perish on the journey.
Slowly, the flare reclaims the dragongrounds, and they are in a sorry, overgrown state.
Scourge circles overhead, roaring loud enough to shake the earth, until every dragon and rider has scattered.
Then he breathes liquid fire over the huge expanse, burning away all the weeds and refuse.
The fire dies away after a time, and then all the dragons rake away the ashes with their talons until the place looks more how it once did.
Nilak and I should have done that. I should have thought of it myself.
Zabriel’s enormous black dragon stands proudly at the center of the grounds.
Nilak pays her respects to the Alpha by going and sitting quietly at his side for a few minutes, something which she has never done before.
Neither dragon acknowledges the other, but all the dragons of the flare notice how the two of them are in unity, and for the first time, a ripple of something like ease passes among them.
As she sits by Scourge’s side, I see so much blood and dirt caked on my white dragon. She has kept me alive, and I’ve been neglecting her. I hurry to collect scrapers, buckets, and cloths and set to work restoring her beauty.
There is no sign of the Shadow King. He has retreated behind a magical barrier far to the south, and he seems to have abandoned his human supporters. But it turns out that the people who inhabit this country are not all human after all. Many of them are Maledinni and didn’t know it.
I listen to the Temple Crone discussing the matter with Zabriel as I stare apathetically into the Font of First Flames.
The people of Maledin were cut off from the dragons, and so their designations have faded away.
There has not been an Alpha or Omega in Maledin for five hundred years.
They have all become scentless Betas, but now that we have returned, it seems that things will change.
“Are you well, dragonmaster?”
It takes me a moment to realize that the Temple Crone has finished her conversation with Zabriel and has approached me. I look up into her old, lined face. She’s thin but strong, like a length of old rope.
“Why wouldn’t I be, Grandmother?” I say flatly.
Her eyes fill with sadness. “I have not seen Minta among the flare. Neither have I seen your former ward. I’m filled with sorrow for you, dragonmaster.”
I grit my teeth and turn back to the flames. She is the only one who has noticed their absence.
There have been many deaths in battle as we have reclaimed Maledin, and I have watched as dragons, riders, and soldiers have been given dragon rites.
Grieved in the proper manner. They have been remembered, but not Zenevieve and Minta.
I’ll never even know how they died, or where. They’re just gone.
“If you wish it, I will burn knot grass with you,” she says gently.
People have gathered to cast knot grass into the flames, murmuring prayers to the gods as the smoke rises through the temple.
Will the gods even remember Zenevieve after five hundred years?
How vibrant she once was, alight with boundless love and energy.
As fast as lightning on her dragon, laughing as the wind whipped her black hair around her face.
And then I remember what I made of her. How I cursed her, rail-thin with haunted eyes and sores around her mouth.
Hollowed out with loneliness and pain because of my selfishness.
I still treasure her in my heart when I have no right to do so and no right to grieve her.
If she rests easy now, my prayers will only cause her bitterness.
“I do not wish it.”
I turn and walk out of the temple, my body aching with every step I take.
The human woman the king is taken with is afraid of the dragons, so I must order the flare not to fly over Lenhale.
I might take little pleasure in victory flights over the city, but my fellow riders deserve their celebrations, and it is a foul offence to curtail the freedoms of our dragons.
But this idiotic village girl who has so besotted Zabriel must have her way, and I wonder who I am serving.
Maledin, or a spoiled prince? Why have I bothered to slaughter hundreds in his name?
But it turns out she’s not just any human. She’s not human at all. She’s Maledinni, and she’s the king’s Omega.
Zabriel has found his Omega.
Though I try and deny it to myself, I am sick with jealousy and resentment.
The gods put his mate five hundred years in the future, and he still found her.
Zabriel is so taken with the girl that he hasn’t noticed that Zenevieve is not among us.
Zenevieve, who once held him dear as a friend, has not crossed his mind.
A little Omega dragon chooses the girl for her rider, and Zabriel’s mate, Isavelle, doesn’t want her.
She doesn’t want her dragon.
This spoiled, petulant child has been chosen by the gods to mate with the king and ride a precious Omega dragon, and she wants neither.
It never crossed my mind that one of our own could not love a dragon.
Such a heinous thing shouldn’t be possible.
Many of my fellow riders are celebrating what they’re calling New Maledin, but there is nothing left of what I love in this time and place.
No order. No honor. No Zenevieve. No esteem for our dragons. The world has been turned upside down.
I hate New Maledin.
Nilak bullies me into staying alive, knocking me out of dismal thoughts with her massive head and sending me sprawling.
Reminding me with indignant blasts of emotion that I have long been the strongest Alpha in Maledin, the other dragonriders look up to me, and the flare needs me.
Where is my strength? Where is my pride?
How dare I feel sorry for myself when there is so much to be done.