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He dropped to sit on the edge of the bed.
Dragons were real.
This is what Kymri was willing to pull a knife on him for. And here he was, his first impulse was to document it to share with the world. This is exactly why he was locked in this place. Because they knew he would expose them.
What would it cost them?
He wasn’t just chasing a fantasy anymore. Now he was faced with the fact these creatures were real, and they were here because they were protected, and these people were willing to protect them with their lives.
Why would they do that?
They must have some kind of relationship with them and in order to have that, they must be sentient.
Had a dragon saved him too —the night of the storm?
Jori scrubbed a hand over his face, reeling, his hands shook.
Reaching into his pack, he extracted his notebook, flipping through it absently as a distraction while his mind adjusted. His eyes slid over drawings of his wrecked plane, landscapes on the island, birds - he’d drawn the outline of the mystery birds high overhead. He could see much more clearly now that they were the same shape as the large beasts he’d just witnessed gliding past his wall. He flipped a few more pages and there was his drawing of the constellation. The stars in the shape of an elegant curving dragon, similar in shape to the silhouette of those he’d just seen. With the book in his upturned hands, his tattoos were visible on his inner forearms. The tattoos taken from his mother’s artwork.
He hadn’t seen it before. He couldn’t explain why he hadn’t seen it before. There it was. Those same shapes were represented in the tattoos. The same outline, the pinpoints of the stars, obscured by the colors of cosmic space dust and tropical flowers.
Had his mother seen these images in books? Or had she actually been here before?
His heart began thumping harder. Something in him whispered that she had.
But when? His mind raced, trying to remember all the places she’d described to him when he was young.
She said she planned to explore this region, not that she already had. She’d always referred to them as mythological or legendary places. And while she had talked about the legends related to this area, she hadn’t told him that she had in reality been here before.
She must have been here before his birth, or while he was too young to remember? It was like she was leading him to these fantastical places without making it real. Why? If she’d been here before, why wouldn’t she just bring him back with her? Why mask it?
He let a thumb slide over the colorful image anchored into his flesh. Most of his tattoos were facsimiles of her semi-abstract art.
Pulling off his shirt, he inspected each one within his view. Without a reflective surface, he couldn’t see the ones adorning his back and shoulders. One of the ones on his abdomen he could recognize as an obscure representation of the shape of the island and its citadel. The first view he saw on approaching the harbor.
Christ.
What else was hidden in her art?
He was excited to suddenly see into the thought of her art though felt pretty damned stupid for not having seen it before now. She was a deliberate and thoughtful woman, of course there was meaning hidden in the images.
He knew this of her. Now, he realized, there was so much more of her he didn’t know. And likely wouldn’t ever. Especially from his father - he never spoke of her, not since she disappeared. Unless Jori pushed on a subject, but even then it wouldn’t be long before he shut the conversation down and walked away. And that’s basically what their relationship was like - since she disappeared.
Before she disappeared, the three of them were very close. He was a happy kid. After... It was like he lost both parents at once.
Jori stared at the images he’d drawn in his notebook and tried to correlate them with the images on his skin.
He was trying to shift his way of viewing his past from the eyes of a child and adolescent to how he thought now as an adult.
What did he really know of his mother?
Kymri hated being confined, but the shamans had insisted she stay abed for at least a couple more days to allow her body and her magic to recover. The only reason she obeyed was because of the newly realized life growing inside her. Propped up in her bed she painted her nails with the vibrant metallic hot pink nail polish and glanced through several fashion magazines smuggled from the continent.
Marli was still missing and the council were growing more and more tense. They refused to let her participate in the search patrols. Reluctantly, she had to admit to herself, after that last round, she probably wouldn’t be able to do a proper job of it.
Kolina’s presence was sparse. Security around the queen tightened even more than it was before.
Now the guards were trying to determine if Jori had any connection to the dragons. The male dragons had been quiet for so long, she had to admit, she’d grown a little relaxed in the last decade, but she would never say that they’d grown careless.
