“But why? What is causing that sorrow?”
I don’t know.She shuffles in her chains, restlessly fluttering her wings for a moment before settling closer to me.Her head lifts skyward, and I remember the way she stared up at that circling dragon. The sense of longing she felt.
Quietly, I ask, “Is it hard for you, being surrounded by these feelings of sorrow? Being chained up here—especially now that your wings have healed?”
I could break these chains, if I wanted to.
“Then why don’t you?”
She slowly lowers her face to mine.Because you have yet to break yours.
“I’m not chained as you are. I agreed to come to this palace, and our agreement has?—”
I’m not talking about your agreement with the king.
Her cryptic words are annoying. I stretch out my legs, only to tuck one back underneath me, trying and failing to get comfortable under the weight of her penetrating stare. “You know, you’re a bit of a know-it-all for a dragon who was born just a short time ago.”
She gives another indignant snort.I have breathed before, in different skin. And I will breathe again when this skin turns to dust. And wisdom does not die; it burns eternal, so long as it has willing bearers.
“In different skin…your kind are capable of reincarnation, you mean?”
She hums out a low, echoing sound. Something ethereal and ancient, like wind sighing through a forest that’s older than civilization itself.
I take it as ayes.
“Do you remember the former dragons you were? The humans you bonded with before?”
This is the only bond that matters now. And I am the only one there is.
The words feel impossibly heavy, even in her soft voice. Iblow out an exasperated breath. “What sort of games are the gods playing, thrusting us into this messy, impossible place? What could they possibly want from a nameless dragon and a nobody from the edge of the Ashlands?”
I am not nameless, and neither are you.
A bitter laugh rises automatically in my throat.
But as I look at her—at the moonlight striking her scales, the powerful grace of her pose, the impossible depth in her gaze—the laughter fades. The bitterness recedes, just for a moment. Just long enough to let a quiet question escape me.
“What is your name, dragon?”
No answer, as expected.
Not at first.
Then a breeze begins to stir, subtle and warm, enveloping me in a scent of smoke and jasmine.
The tips of my fingers and toes tingle. The sensation sweeps in toward my heart, a wave that soon pulses through my entire body. It carries with it a single word, presses it into my mind like a promise, deeper than either of the ones I marked on my arms.
Sesca.
The voice that speaks the name doesn’t sound like her—and yet I know, beyond any doubt, that thisisher. Everything she is, or was, or ever will be.
I want to speak it out loud. But my lips won’t move. I feel even more like a nobody as I hold it in my mouth. Like I’m not meant to have it, I haven’t earned it, I can’t possibly carry the weight of it without stumbling and falling.
Yours, now,she insists.
I close my eyes, resisting the familiar urge to deny her. To run. When I open them again, she’s watching me like I’m the only thing in the world that she’s aware of just then.
Another question trembles out of me. “And what sort of flame do you see when you look into my soul?”
