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Chapter Eleven
Dragons needed littlesleep after they reached a certain age.
But Sorin’s heart and soul had been through the wringer. He’d sent more than a millennia and a half pass, and the past few hundred years had each dragged by inexorably slow, every revolution around the sun taking an aeon.
He was young yet for a dragon, but as he lay behind Gia’s warm body, felt the soft rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, the way the air currents around them stirred with each breath, he felt weariness wash over him. It wasn’t the weariness of ennui. It was a deep, emotional weariness he hadn’t experienced in an age. When the veil of sleep came, he didn’t fight it.
It took little time for him to tumble into a dream and that the dream was crystalline in its clarity wasn’t an odd thing, not for him, and he only knew it wasn’t such for others because he’d once been a very nosy dragon.
Dragons dream differently from humans.
Some of the elders of his kind, ones he’d never met but whose knowledge had been passed down to him believed their dreams weren’t necessarily dreams at all, but a mix of prophecy and visions into the past.
Sorin had a mind to believe that, especially now. For it wasn’t only his past that stood before him...but his future.
It was Adela, in a manner of speaking.
But as he looked into her azure eyes, they changed and deepened into a rich, forest green while her body morphed and became Gia’s.
“I found you,” she told him as he moved to cup her face.
“Beloved.”
She closed her hands around his wrists and stared at hm. “Sorin.” Confusion filled her eyes as she looked around. “This place...” She gasped. “I know this place. I’ve dreamed...”
She broke away, bending over with her arms clutched to her abdomen. “The pain.”
He scooped her into his arms and cradled her close.
“Stop,” he growled, although he didn’t know who or what he was growling at.
She glared at him through tear-filled eyes even as she moaned, a spasm wracking her anew. “I’m not doing this. Fuck, I feel like...”
Her eyes clouded, then, slowly, she pushed at his chest, a grimness appearing in her eyes, in the set of her jaw. She was still rigid with pain but the way she looked at him made it clear she was wouldn’t be denied as she said, “Put me down.”
He did, reluctantly, even as he forced part of his brain to focus on the bizarre dream. No, dragons didn’t dream as humans did. His mother had had some human blood. He’d learned that much over the years, although he had no idea how much. But he doubted he’d suddenly started having human-like dreams out of the blue.
Gia grunted and he knew she was still struggling against whatever pain was ailing her in this dreamscape. Furious that something in one of his dreams would harm her, he spun around, searching for some sign of what could be happening.
And he found the answer.
He was indeed facing his past, and not only in that strange way Adela had come to him and slowly changed into Gia.
“The village,” he whispered.
It burned before them. The world sped by, the flames stuck in fast forward, the day melting away into night, as fire became smoldering ruins and billowing black plumes of smoke became puffs of gray.
A girl emerged from the shadows.
Time slowed to a crawl. She was a thin thing, hovering on that verge between girlhood and womanhood, all long coltish limbs with a face that was pretty under the smoke and bruises...and blood.
Sorin’s rage grew as he realized there was blood in other places, and not just on her hands, or staining the knife she carried clutched at her side.
The child had violated, then forced to take at least one life.
Another sin to lay at my feet,he thought, old anger, old guilt, all of it rising anew.
“I know her,” Gia whispered, her voice no longer tinged with agony. She sounded numb.
