Chapter 10: Beautiful Nightmare

A tug at her blanket awoke Sylph. She did not even remember dozing off. It must have happened between trying to estimate the rate of absorption per scale and Brandon checking his formulas on that small piece of parchment he had found. Using her ability had left her oddly tired. She opened her eyes to several notes plastered onto the wall behind him, and he looked quite busy with another one.

A snow-covered peak traveling past the window caught her attention immediately. The ocean inside her shifted as she raised her head to get a better look. She recognized that chiseled peak and a hollow opened inside of her chest. She had gone back to the very beginning. Every scale on her body stood up straight like needles on a pine tree and all she wanted was to head back home to her over-sized nest behind Carthia’s massive walls and curl up beneath a large blanket.

Three days passed since they left Halfhill. Dalian had not appeared in her dreams yet. She had hoped that he would. Maybe he would have given in and told her the truth if he knew where she was headed. Then she would not have to step on that island.

Her heart pounded and her body grew even colder. The answers had to be so close, hidden somewhere in the old village. But now that she was this close, she had second thoughts. What if she found something she did not want to see again? A splash of tea on the side of her face brought her back to reality. “I’ll mark that down as no subconscious reflex to absorb water,” Brandon said and watched the tea drip down her snout. It absorbed as soon as she wanted it to.

“I’ll mark that down as you being an asshole,” she teased him. “It doesn’t work if I don’t want to.”

He dragged his box closer and sat down next to her. They stared at the window and the passing treetops as the ship circled and looked for a suitable landing spot. “You won’t get answers without trying,” he said.

“It’s not alchemy, it does not work that way.” She slung her tail around her body to keep it under the heavy blanket. It had not stopped twitching since that mountain peak appeared. “I feel like it is do or die. Either there is something to be found, or nothing.” She swallowed hard as fractures of old memories appeared in front of her inner eye. It had been so many years. The memories should mean nothing and yet it felt as though she was about to walk into the open jaws of a predator and could not stop her tail from shaking as much as she tried.

“We can still go back,” Brandon said quietly, and she realized her face and tail showed her thought more obviously than she thought if even Brandon noticed.

She shook her head. “I won’t let terrible memories stop me. I said it before we left. There is nothing dangerous on that island and I have come too far to turn around with my tail between my legs.” Sylph averted her gaze. “You won’t stay on the ship, right?”

“Of course not, I’ll be right behind you.” Brandon straightened his clothes and checked the bag standing beside him.

She could have brought someone else along. Another dragon she knew from the arena perhaps, someone with fighting experience. Someone that could hold their own in what could be a harsh, deserted island. And yet, she did not even consider any of them. She had a feeling deep in her gut that marked Brandon down as trustworthier than anybody else and she could not say why. Maybe because he had never commented on her crippled wings or her scar. He had shown her respect from the day they met and only improved his impression since then. Even if he was a tad twitchy with customers back in the day.

The ship sat down with a heavy thump and threw Brandon a few inches upward with his hands at his shoelaces. He fell forward and hit the floor with a grunt. The ramp at the back opened halfway, stopped, then dropped all the way down with a mechanic screech. “You have until sundown!” the captain’s voice boomed from the upper deck.

Snowflakes blew in and a gush of determination flooded Sylph’s body. It was now or never. She threw away the blanket and jumped off the boxes. The water pooled in her legs and she landed like four sacks of flour. She dragged the center upwards, but it barely listened and her steps remained slow and unsteady. What should have been her stoic stride towards the truth was now nothing more than an embarrassed waddle down the ramp. Brandon chuckled behind her. “My legs are pudding,” Sylph laughed.

A gust of cold air bit her face as she surveyed the vast field of white in front of her. Linz in winter was the definition of beautiful landscape; untouched snow encircled the dense forest, and the sun illuminated the mountainside in a warm orange. Wyvern shrieked in alarm, hidden deep in the ancient canopy. It was all an illusion. The untouched snow a burial cloth, covering the grotesque face of the past. No amount of glistening snow could hide what happened. Sylph stepped into the fresh snow and listened to the hearty crunch beneath her paw. The sound brought back a pleasant memory for once. It reminded her of Void’s arrival and his strut through the deep snow. That memory merged with other, less pleasant memories. She drew a deep breath, took the second step, and it got easier from there. She was not a slave anymore. She was not Sylph anymore.

She trudged through the snow and stopped a few meters away from the ship to stretch her body to its full length, enjoying every audible crack in her joints. The water had to go and while she could certainly let nature do its job to get rid of the excess water, precision was of no concern out here and she would rather not spend hours in this state. Her ability was responsible for this, and it could fix it.

“Hey, watch this.” She took a deep breath and moved the center of water as far upwards as she could. Pressure built up inside of her and pushed against her scales in undulating waves. She released her concentration, and it shot out in a torrential gush from every scale that drenched the snow all around her.

Steam curled up from the ground as the snow melted away. She sighed in relief as her legs de-puddified and the cold retreated. She flexed her arm. Her scales felt tight, like a new skin altogether. “Never again will nature urge me to leave the warm embrace of my nest prematurely.” She straightened her stiff body once again.

Brandon shot her an amused, if not uncomfortable, gaze and took a cautious step away. “I am wondering if you actually drank the tea or used it as a hot water bottle.”

They passed the young fir trees on the outskirts of the forest and Sylph remembered why she disliked walking on snow. Her paws found little grip in the deeper snow and the crunching made it quite hard to rely on ears alone. The coat looked untouched, but the deeper into the forest they went, the thinner it got and she could not be sure that they were alone. She drew a deep breath. There is nothing left to be afraid of, she reassured herself once again.

A shrill cry, like chalk screeching over stone, echoed through the forest and her head swiveled in the sound’s direction, ears perked. She remembered that cry; it sent her captors to their homes to hide, or pick up weapons and tools to defend themselves. Her muscles tensed and dragonheart ignited.

“That sounded angry,” Brandon noted and edged a step closer towards her. His gaze wandered around the distant tops of the trees.

“Maybe we wandered into its territory.” Sylph stopped talking to listen for movement in the canopy. Twigs cracked in the distance. Snow dropped to the floor. Something moved, something small, not heavy enough for anything dangerous, maybe squirrels and whatever they got up to. “Let’s hope I have grown large enough to be a real deterrent. You, it sees as potential food.”

Brandon’s gaze followed hers and he stepped uncomfortably close. “That is not very comforting. You said there was nothing dangerous here.”

Her tail twitched. “I don’t exactly remember all the wildlife. Well, this one’s cry I just remembered. But I am sure it won’t attack us. We’ll be as quick as we can and don’t split up.”

The trees continued to grow older and higher. Storytellers barely spent longer than a single paragraph on Linz. Half of her hatchlinghood, all that it took from her, boiled down to a few sentences. She was the last one alive to remember it. The stable was so cramped she could not turn around. The door inches from her face, with sixteen nails. The handful of straw beneath the only thing between her and the dirt. The heavy collar that chafed against her young and soft scales every time she moved. Her gums twitched and her chest grew hot as more and more pictures flooded her mind. Spoiled food scraps. Muddy water. Being forgotten for days and forced to sleep in her own waste. Struck with a stick for talking back.

The paint above her scar itched and her claws dug deeper into the ground with each step, catching on the frozen dirt below. You’d go to jail for animal cruelty in the kingdom for treating a cow like that. Come to think of it, the cow in Linz lived better than her. Her tail slapped from side to side. Treating a hatchling like that, they got what they deserved.

Brandon stumbled and brushed against her wing. The sudden sting, and more so the surprise in her train of thought, send a jolt through her body, causing her to flinch to the side and hiss. The sound of which surprised both.

“Sorry.” Brandon staggered backwards.

Sylph closed her mouth with a smack. Heat rose to her face as she turned away and laughed a single ha. “That-, I am not a wyvern. You did not hear that, alright!” Her face burned hotter than her chest as she spoke.

Brandon burrowed his hands in his pockets. “I did not know you could make that sound.” He put a step more distance between them.

“Me neither. It’s this place,” Sylph said after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, “It holds a lot of terrible memories.”

“I can only imagine what you had to go through. I’m sorry,” Brandon said.

“Everybody is. Everybody that knows, not the storytellers.” Sylph said brashly. In her experience, the sentence meant very little.

Brandon stopped in his tracks and faced her with his arms held out, gesturing at the surrounding forest. “There are people like me who genuinely just want to express their sympathies. You deserve so much better.”

Sylph scoffed. “Do I?” They walked in silence up a gentle incline, and after a few more minutes, the forest grew old enough to see the old trees vanish as thin, young trees took their place. On a second glance, it was not the forest that grew old; Trees had been cut. She sprinted up the last few hundred meters of the small incline, stopping to catch her breath and gaze ahead at its peak.

The first, charred wooden huts poked out of the snow like spots of dirt on white scales. Sylph swallowed hard as she looked out over the valley.

“There is no one still living here, right?” Brandon pressed himself against the next tree and peaked around. A useless gesture considering Sylph stood out like a blue dragon in a dark, snow-covered forest.

“Looks pretty dead and I can’t hear anyone.” She surveyed the clearing and spotted a large rock formation at the edge of the woods. She knew that rock. One of the few things she had vaguely fond memories about. She imagined it to be a magic creature that would one day crush the village with its boulder arms. Sadly, it never did. She approached the formation, scaled it with three precise jumps and stopped on the large flat rock on top. Between her eyes and ears, it would be hard to miss any signs of life from up here. “Let’s hope there are tangible clues about my parents so we don’t have to go looking for souls.”

Brandon stood at the bottom of the rock, feeling around for a foothold. “Right, I’d rather not deal with that.”

Sylph brushed away the snow on the top with her tail and sat down. Her gaze went straight to the village square. Time had stopped, the memory of that day had been imprinted forever. Spikes of ice, as long as a grown man and sharp as obsidian, had impaled every single human on the square. Skeletons were all that remained today, picked clean of flesh years ago by scavengers and other wyvern. A few of the spikes were empty, the bones whipped away by the elements.

Brandon scrambled up behind her. “I am curious. Did your new ability help with that soul stuff Dalian is up to?”

Sylph snorted. “The basics of making a puddle took me less than a day and the path of souls is a mystery five years later. It’s like asking you to fix an engine because a small part of it uses an alchemical process.” She clenched her pfod. Hopefully, it would not come down to her having to use it to find somebody’s soul on the island. “It took Dalian over fifty years. So what can I expect to achieve in five?”

She watched Brandon slowly make his way up. “Excuse me? Fifty years? He looks like thirty.”

“I’m not going to recall the whole Rise of Void.” Nobody ever questioned where Dalian and Veria came from. They simply accepted that two dragons appeared on an island that was devoid of all life for years. Maybe that was for the better. Veria had told her what got them imprisoned, and it sounded a tad unbelievable.

Brandon reached for the next step. “I’ll stop questioning pathwalker hows and whys. They don’t know what they are doing half the time either, am I right?” She turned towards the sound of a cracking twig. “Don’t ask me, I am not with the guild. They wouldn’t call it magic if it made sense.”

He finally pulled himself upwards and, very carefully, stood next to her. He turned his gaze towards the village square. “Oh, by the six!” Brandon yelled and turned away as he spotted the impaled remains.

“Morgen’s gift. The story likes to ignore that part too.” Sylph continued to observe the village. Nothing moved or made a sound. The snow looked untouched and fresh.

“Who is Morgen? And what by Myria makes this a gift? To whom?” Brandon gesticulated wildly.

Sylph turned to face him. “Me.” Brandon went quiet.

Something about the village felt different from up here. It lacked the oppressive, dreadful aura she remembered. The houses looked so small, it could all fit into Carthia’s training field. She looked down at the ruins, the bleached bones and the blanket of snow. A strange sense of calm and triumph drove away the cold from her limbs. All this time this place had haunted her and now she sat and observed its corpse like a dragoness her kill. It had not been her doing, but it felt like justice.

“I still remember the day,” she said and curled her tail-tip under herself. Pictures of her past mingled with the scene before her. The ice-spikes vanished, and the houses grew large and imposing as she remembered. The feeling of triumph vanished, and the cold returned. “They had me on a leash to train me when nightfall came early, or so I thought as Void’s wings blocked out the sun.” She looked up to the blue skies, almost wishing for it to happen again. “Do you know the fear that locks up every muscle in your body and robs your breath? I felt like nothing in Void’s shadow. It swallowed me whole and took my mind hostage. I could only stare straight at what I thought was death.”

“I can imagine what it was like to be saved by Void.” Brandon pronounced the word as though it wasn’t the truth.

“There was a standoff,” Sylph continued, as memories played in front of her inner eye. “I barely understood what they talked about. The slavers were prepared to fight the impossible, pitchforks and axes against teeth the size of tree-trunks. Fear seeped through their ranks like a disease.” She remembered the strain on her neck as her collar pulled back her, but her legs would not move. “And then Void’s soft, dark-blue gaze fell on me and for the first time in my life I knew things would be fine.”

“A gaze as dark as midnight and deadly as a thousand blades that herald the coming doom,” Brandon quoted from a more famous play on the subject.

Sylph shook her head. “None of the storytellers ever saw his face. His eyes couldn’t look evil and his gaze was quite dadly indeed. You wouldn’t think him capable of what he did. Well, he scared my breakfast out of me when he tried to pick me up. I thought he was going to eat me. But picking up a hatchling by the scruff of their neck is a normal thing to do, as it turned out.” She reached for the spot at the end of her neck, but replicating the strange calming sensation yourself was impossible. Veria had never picked her up like that, mainly because Sylph was too large for her to do so.

Brandon leaned forward. “We are talking about the same Void that tried to annihilate this world and killed thousands of people in his undead war, right?” His voice sounded agitated, but she could never hate Void. He was the first dragon to care about her. In fact, he would be worried if he knew she had returned here. “He wasn’t my father like the storytellers believe, but I wouldn’t have minded that.”

Brandon struggled for an answer as he intensely stared at the impaled skeletons. “I-” He shook his head and spoke again, “How can you say that? He was a monster.” His eyes spoke volumes. He believed Void to be the monster he knew from the story.

Sylph nodded at the spikes of ice. “I said this was Morgen’s gift. A human pathwalker, old king even. Sawaila was his home, like it is ours. He despised slavery and delivered his sentence. I am not sure if Void would’ve spared them, but Morgen took the initiative.”

Brandon’s expression flicked between mortified and confused. Slavery carried the death penalty in the kingdom. She scraped over the stone with one of her full claws and watched Brandon shiver at the sound. “I know what Void did. I am not dumb. It was a war. Neither side was innocent. But at that point in time, I did not care or know about any of that. I was just happy to be rescued, and he was very nice to me and everyone around him.”

“He led the dead against the living. This wasn’t a squabble between two kingdoms.”

“The dead are people, too. That thought started the war.” Sylph raised her voice. “And now the dead are closer than ever, but people don’t give a shit because they don’t even know. Both sides won. Why do you think Dalian can pull people into the Veil? All of his undead, where do you think they went? All into the Veil where they belong.” She turned back to the village ahead and shook her head. “I did not come here to talk about Void and the screw-ups of someone else’s past. So let’s drop that subject.” She hopped off the rock into the deep snow below.

Brandon rubbed his hands together and stared down at her, judging the height. “You are probably right.” She did not blame him for disagreeing. He had not met him.

“Jump,” she motioned, and he stared at the drop for another second before shaking his head. He carefully climbed down the back instead.

Close up, the village looked even sparser than she remembered and not only because it had been burned to the ground. The houses were as simple as could be and not a single lightglobe was to be seen. She recalled some precious metal tools guarded like treasure.

How did she even end up in the hands of a village this poor? She had been a drain on their food, if hers could be called that. The most work she did was drag firewood and carry a bag, other times she did nothing for days. She was pretty useless as a slave. A low growl escaped her throat. “And still they kept me!” Sylph yelled at the impaled skeletons. “Bastards!” She swiped at the nearest ice spike. Her claws slid over the cold, smooth surface without leaving a scratch.

Nothing in her thoughts and hopes prepared her for an answer. The voice sounded muffled and hollow, like a brass horn underwater. “You sound like you are the one that will take my life.” A slim figure rose from beneath a layer of snow like one would from a long night of sleep. How had they slipped through her senses?

Sylph dug her feet into the frozen ground and pounced on the frail human without a second thought. With outstretched arms, she smashed into the figure, dug her claws into their shoulder and forced them to the ground with her weight and momentum.