Dragons and Princes - [COMPLETE]

1. Faeana

FAEANA

When we were young, my father asked us to take up the sword even though we were taught never to show emotion.  I had seen the contradiction, and I had protested.  And then my mother and my sister were taken from me, and I watched helplessly as my little brother was almost taken by the storm.  Now, with every night that passes, my mind is filled with red memories and treacherous imaginings of being murdered in my own bed.  I wish I knew why this war rages because, perhaps, I would think of a way to end it.  I am afraid to lose one more loved one to its terrible jaws.  But neither my brother nor my father believe that reason alone could end a war.

I have seen Fenrir warriors hesitate before Freyja who have reached their limit, and that flicker of recognition between them is ever so brief, as when lightning strikes the ground in a storm.  It grows more difficult to raise my own weapon wheen I look upon the dead, when the storm within me rages and takes from me my strength.  I would kneel by the fallen to weep, but Freyja do not cry.  We are raised to be as stone, and we direct our armored war cats to destroy those who threaten us.

And I wonder, is ours the same fear that I see mirrored in the eyes of fallen wolfmen?  I can never tell beyond their hate.

It frustrates me to argue with my brother, who says the swords we carry are all that protects us from our final song.  I worry if it does us more harm to draw Death with these blades than it does to banish ourselves from the mountain trees we call our home?  To find a new home among the Other Lands across the seas, where the song we know is called Spirit, and men do not bond with  the minds and hearts of animals in our way.

Still, my father does not see the snake that eats its tail.  I fear his heart is much too broken.  And I worry my little brother follows too eagerly.  They are too willing to allow vengeance to sour the song within them.

Faeana Dagur,

Heir of the Eye