“I’m sorry to argue with you, sir, but King Alastor traces his lineage back five hundred years. I have copied the records myself.”
I think I’m going to throw up.
Green light flickers in the corner of my vision. Outside the monastery, men in robes are gathering magic in their hands. There are no wingrunners to pick them off. My dragon is in danger, so I race back across the snow, and we take to the skies.
I fly without thinking for several minutes before the sight of the mountains jolts me out of my stupor, and I return to the others.
Zabriel glares at me as I dismount my dragon among the other riders. “I was about to pronounce you a deserter, Stesha.”
How calm they all look, for they do not know what I do. “It has not been days. It has not been months. We have been under a spell for—”
But Zabriel has already turned his back to me and continues to give orders.
They will all know the truth soon enough. I retreat behind Nilak, and my heart is pierced with agony and grief. I fall to my knees in the snow and bite back a howl of pain.
Zenevieve is lost to me. She died long ago. Alone, afraid, and hating me.
Each day passesin 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 My insides feel like they have been replaced by cogs and pulleys, and someone else is yanking on the ropes.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 regainingground. 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 castleand 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?”
