A Dragon's Retribution [Book 3 in Rising Dragons]

Chapter 22: Seeryath VIII

Sand shifted beneath my paws. The desert was harsh, always had been, and never pretended to be anything else. Once, I wouldn't have tried to be the same and simply assumed I was the same – I knew better, now though. Now, I tried to be exactly who I was and aware of who I was.

I wondered what the other two were thinking. After all, we all have different opinions about where we were. Azrael didn't have the connection Thirak and I had to this place, but he knew why we were here, where we were. He had known it when we had turned our wings east and mentioned a place where no would one expect to find us, but he hadn't said anything – letting us have our silence. It was a kindness that we did not necessarily deserve, but life wasn't often about what we deserved. I knew that now.

Last time Thirak had been here, we had been on opposite sides of everything – the desert, the war. Maybe some would say we were two sides of the same coin, but I would disagree. We were dragons, and in that similar, and different for who we were. We weren't opposites, we just were.

Thirak huffed quietly beside me, golden scales shining in the sunlight, offering a heavy juxtaposition against white scar tissue. He had claimed that it was far too hot to remain as a human in the desert, and perhaps this was the truth – but I doubted it was the whole truth. Nonetheless, I wasn't going to push. Kindness could be offered, and there was no reason not to offer it.

This way, I finally said, tearing my eyes away from the horizon with its heat haze, away from illusions brought on by shimmering air, away from a past and a horrific image of bones and blood. The past wouldn't leave me. It was part of me, that couldn't be refuted, but that didn't mean I lived in it. Leading the other two, I took them to where there had once been-

Where once there'd been-

Where there had once been tents and people and dragons. Now, though, there was nothing there. But it felt like everything was still there, hidden behind a magic illusion I hadn't broken through. It was easy to see other dragons ducking around tents, riders joking among one another, weapons being checked and armour tightened. It seemed that if I were to wish just a bit harder, I could hear Sky calling-

Rya, Azrael murmured softly, and I broke away from a life left behind, from a memory of what had once been, from a what if that had died in fire and war, from a dream. Because that's all it was – a dream. I would never get back what I had once, and I was starting to accept this, had started accepting this for a while now. It was a constant work in progress, but life was often hard and this was no different.

Sky was long dead and gone, but her memory wasn't, her influence wasn't. She was still alive in everything I did. Sky had been my whole world, even if we hadn't had long together. It was difficult to think, at first, with my rider gone, but I had eventually found a way to think, and Sky would want me to live. I knew her and she knew me. For all our fighting and issues, we had come together and resolved it all. Dragon and rider. Rider and dragon. Two words that were meant to easily encapsulate everything we were to one another. They didn't summarise it, but I doubted words could. It was a bundle of emotions tangled on my tongue, feelings that didn't give rise to words. How could anyone convey that? It simply was.

That, however, was neither here nor now.

I looked at the sand that had claimed where everything had once been. Even now, months later, I could make out bits and pieces, sticking out of the sand, that had once formed a camp. A ragged tent here, a maybe table there. We – Eggja – had left everything as it was when we went to that final battle, expecting that we would come back to where we had left it, predicating that we would win and make it out alive. Instead, the desert had claimed it and all of us had fallen in one way or another.