The Iron Dragon

Chapter 5. Moving on

( 41 Year of the Exalted Age to 41 Year of the Dragon Age )

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Free, that was all I felt when I was above the clouds, as I often was. I felt the wind moving with me, not against me. How each beat of my wings made me faster and how I glided through the clouds as if it had been my constant companion since the beginning of time. At first I could not get enough of this feeling. The feeling of being able to get as close to the stars as no one had ever been before, of being able to see and feel a lightning bolt before it races down to earth and to be able to see every sunrise and sunset so clearly before my own eyes, even though it was covered by thick clouds from far below and only a dim light could catch it. In the meantime I had made it my task to fly over the clouds every morning before sunrise and wait until their rays greeted me as if I was their dearest companion in this world. Often I had the feeling that I was the only one who had the possibility to take in the beginning of a day like this.

It had been a long time since I had found out who I really was. Much time in which I learned and experienced what it meant to be a dragon's blood. A lot had changed and some things hadn't. I myself had grown and could proudly say that I even surpassed some Qunari, although not by much. My senses were sharper than ever, thanks to my almost daily training and my body was, as far as I could tell, quite visible, especially the muscles of my whole body were of special clarity and the golden brown tone of my skin seemed to support this even more. My hair, which was also of a seductive golden tone, played wildly like flames around my golden horns, which had grown to a considerable size. My turquoise-blue eyes, whose pupils had the ability to slit in dangerous situations, supported the whole package immensely.

But if you knew the stately age of more than four hundred years, you could of course see that something had not changed much over time. I looked like a young man in his mid-twenties, and I had looked like that for a very long time. The transformation from my more human side into a dragon didn't cause me any problems anymore and lasted only a few seconds in which blue flames surrounded me and fortunately no more pain haunted me. The warm feeling and the sudden change of my body during a transformation was already a routine feeling for me and didn't demand any more effort like it was with my first one. When I thought back to how my transformation came about, I couldn't help but smile, as these memories and experiences had been the turning point in my life.

I remembered the dragon who had given me this fate and his words, which still meant a lot to me today. After I changed for the first time and went straight to the sky for my first flight, he died down there proudly...proud to have met someone like me, to have given someone like me the push I needed to become what I am today. I hadn't been able to look him in the eye again when my human form reappeared. I had not thanked him again. All I could do was to pay my last respects to him and burn his body so that the then raging storm could carry him away to the land where he really wanted to die. Thinking back, I really would have liked to have asked him his name back then, simply so that it would have linked these memories even more firmly with mine.

In the many years that had passed, I had seen parts of the world as I had never dared to dream of. Mountains that rose into the sky, seas that stretched into infinity, caves that sheltered many creatures deep below the earth, vast plains of sand that seemed to swallow everything else, rivers and lakes that made their way through many countries, meadows as colourful as if every known plant had decided to grow there and forests that contained such a variety of species as I had never seen before. I just wanted to see everything and explore every corner as if it was my last day. Old, long forgotten ruins were found and explored by me again, hoping that they would tell and show me everything they had seen. Ancient scriptures, artifacts, books and other treasures had never been safe from my curiosity and thirst for knowledge and everything I found I took with me to build my own little paradise...No, honestly I didn't want to give any of it away anymore, because I really felt incredibly good about owning all this and looking at it from time to time. I had to admit that this urge to hoard treasures would never leave me.