NOVEL NEXT Chapter 39: Together
Aoife
My eyes opened to vast empty space and a starry sky. This dream again? What the hell could Cyrus possibly wa-?
“He won’t be coming. You don’t have to worry.”
I whirled towards the source of the voice. There was a man. He looked to be around thirty, and his scales were silver, lined with veins of gold. His horns were more like antlers, and his blue tail was covered in golden spikes. Was he one of the past moons? What did that even mean? Why were parts of him gold?
“So many questions, but you haven’t even asked my name. Shameful really. I know they say that times change, but has etiquette really degraded that much? It’s only been a thousand years, after all.”
Wait, could he-?
“Read your thoughts? We’re in a dream, little Aoife. This whole place is made of your thoughts.” He shook his head. “Tsk tsk, and you still haven’t asked my name.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Well now, in my day, we don’t interrupt people when they’re speaking, and certainly not when they’re thinking. Now what’s your name and what do you want?”
“It’s Alex, my friend, and as you’ve correctly deduced, I was the moon dragon one thousand two hundred and twenty four years ago, just as you are now. The others elected me to share with you our history. You face a terrible danger, after all. So long as Cyrus lives, you will never know true peace… I’m speaking from experience…”
“But why? What does he want? What the hell could he possibly be trying to save me from? And why are you gold, anyway? I’ve seen some of the others. We’re blue and silver, right? Gold is the sun, isn’t it?”
With a wave of his hand, Alex conjured a comfy looking sofa from the featureless ground beneath us. He sat at one end and gestured for me to join him. I did.
“I was getting there, Aoife, but you’re right. Gold is the sun’s color…” He sighed. “The moon is, in essence, a mirror. It has no light of its own. Instead, it reflects the light of the sun to shine on earth. As dragons of the moon, our bodies are much like mirrors as well. We reflect those we love.”
He looked me up and down, smiling as he did so.
“Hey, weren’t your horns different before? They were longer, and stuck straight out of your head. Now, they’re almost like-”
“-a bull’s.”
Holy shit, he was right. How? When? Why didn’t I notice? Alex just laughed.
“What did you say about interrupting?” He winked at me. “It’s slow, Aoife. The change takes time, and sometimes it can be hard to notice. I don’t think your changes are done though. No moon’s ever fallen for a pixie before. I’m interested in what might come of that.”
But wait, if we reflect those we love, then does that mean..?
“Yes, Aoife. There is gold in my scales because I was in love. I’m getting ahead of myself though. Let me start at the beginning…”
Alex
I was sixteen when the moons first spoke to me. They came to me in my dreams, telling me what I was… what was coming. I didn’t believe them, of course. I brushed their claims off as nothing more than strange dreams. I was an ordinary boy working on his family’s ordinary farm in a backwater village where the most magical thing around were the occasional pixies coming to bless our crops. I couldn’t possibly be a dragon, and there was no way any dragon would take an interest in me.
I was nineteen when I was proven wrong. For years, I’d been pointedly ignoring the voices in my dreams, pretending not to notice when I was just a little too strong, a little too fast. It all changed when he arrived. Dorian, the gold dragon, defender of humanity, had come to my village. I knew him on sight. He was about a year older than me, with tanned skin and long brown hair tied in a low ponytail. He came with his retinue of guards and angels, strode into the village center, and smiled at me.
“I take it you know why I’m here, moon. Tell me, what’s your name?”
He’d called me moon. Only the voices in my dreams called me that. It was all real then. I couldn’t deny it anymore, no matter how much I wished I could. I really wished I could…
With Dorian here, my fate was sealed. The voices had told me as much. The sun and the moon were fated to clash, and the moon always lost. It was inevitable. The power of the sun dragon was always passed to one who’d place humanity, fragile and lacking in magic, above all others, and the moon would always find someone who couldn’t stand for that.
And I couldn’t stand for that.
It’s not that I hated humanity. I believed they were as worthy of life and happiness as all others, but I knew what the other suns had done. I’d seen it. My dreams had shown me the slaughter of the Nixies, the war with the Lamias, the “cleansing” of the goblin tribes. The sun wouldn’t tolerate coexistence. Only absolute domination would do.
And the moon always lost. Time and time again, countless moons had struggled against countless suns and not once did they come out on top. The choice laid before me was the same choice faced by every other moon. I could either fight a losing fight and die, burned, cut, and in pain, or I could surrender. I could sit back and watch as he enacted his slaughter, living out my remaining centuries as an obedient, complacent servant. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want any of that. I told him as much.
“My name is Alex, and you’re Dorian. I’ve heard stories about you…” I began to cautiously walk towards him with my hands raised. “I don’t want to fight you.”
A flicker of doubt flashed across his eyes.
“Then surrender.”
I was right in front of him now.
“I don’t want to do that either. I’m not the kind of guy who can just sit back while people die. Not if I have the power to stop it.”
“They’re not people. They’re-”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.” Slowly, I lowered my arms to my sides. “Don’t just do as you’re told, don’t just regurgitate shit you don’t believe. I don’t want to fight you… and I don’t think you want that either.”
“Then what? What are we supposed to do?”
For the first time, I smiled at him.
“Truce? What if you and the humans don’t do your whole conquest thing, and I just stay at my farm… mostly. I might keep an eye on things to make sure you don’t just go conquering behind my back.”
“Fine. Ok. Truce. I’ll try. It’s just… the dreams…”
“I know… they’re horrible… but I’ve been ignoring them for years. We can stay strong. Together.”
I was thirty five when he came to my village again. He wanted to stay with me.
“The humans… They keep trying to push me into things. They want a weapon. They want war. The king was expecting a proper sun dragon. He hates me…”
He was crying.
“I just- I need to get away from them. My dreams are screaming at me, and with them… I just need someone who isn’t yelling at me.”
That was the first time I hugged him. I held him tight until he drifted off to sleep, and when he woke up in tears, I held him again. He was warm.
They came for him within a week. They came for us both with their potions and bombs and swords. They said that if he wouldn’t kill me, they’d do it themselves. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about truces or promises anymore. We left. Together, we flew off into the mountains and together, we made our home.
I was thirty seven when I realized I loved him. My body realized before I did. Before I knew it, my horns changed to match his, and gold started popping up all over my body. I tried to hide it for a while, but eventually, I was found out. I’d been avoiding him for weeks, leaving for long hunting trips, hiding in my little hoard of fine herbs and spices, turning away when I saw him. One day though, he found me, and he recognized his own horns on the spot. I was terrified, but he told me he felt the same way. That was the first time I kissed him. His breath was hot on my lips as I’m sure mine was cold on his. His eyes burned with desire, in every conceivable sense, and when his hand brushed the base of my horns, now forever marked as his, I could hardly stand.
For a while, he slept easier.
I was a hundred and twelve when the humans found us again. There was a new king. Maybe the old king’s grandson? I didn’t really know. He came for us himself, and again, we flew off together. We didn’t want to leave. There were so many memories in our maze of tunnels and caves. We didn’t want to kill anyone either though, so leave we did. It hurt, but we were together. That’s what mattered.
Together, we flew across half the continent, into lands completely unknown to us, and together, we made our home once again. With what little treasure we’d managed to keep when we fled our lair, we bought a cozy little home in a city of elves.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s when Dorian’s voices changed tact. No longer did they scream and berate him. Instead, they whispered.
As we laid down to bed, on the anniversary of our first year in our new home, Dorian made me a whispered promise.
“Alex… I love you… I’ll always protect you… you know that, right?”
“I know…” I reached up to touch my horn, his horn. “I love you too.”
I was a hundred and eighty four when I woke up in a cage. I didn’t realize it at first, I was home, safe in bed, but Dorian wasn’t there. I found him, tracing sigils with his blood on our door. They really were his horns, the spines on my tail were his, the gold flecks in my eyes were his as well, so his blood worked just as well as mine would’ve for the binding spell. Our house. Our home. He turned it into my very own cozy prison.
Fight and die or submit and be his.
I’d made that choice after all.
I didn’t know how to react, whether to scream or cry or try to hit him. In the end, I just asked him a question.
“Why?”
“The voices… the suns… they’ve changed. They care about you now. They promised they do. The elves, if they knew about you, if they knew about us, they’d try to hurt you. Your blood, your bones, your scales, they’d take everything… I have to stop them.”
He stepped out the door.
I tried to go to him. I tried to run to his side, to hold him, to kiss him, to beg him not to do this, but I bounced off an invisible force in the doorway.
“I haven’t forgotten our truce. Our promise. They won’t have a reason to hurt you if there’s no magic at all anymore. They’ll just be human, and you will be too. Like you always dreamed of. I’ll save you Alex.”
Now I really was crying, pressed against the magic of the binding spell, straining desperately against the powerful blood magic.
“Dorian please! Whatever you’re planning, please stop! If magic really does go away, even if that doesn’t kill people on its own, billions will die in the chaos after! Please… It doesn’t have to end this way.”
He was walking away. He didn’t turn back.
“At least let me say goodbye…”
He didn’t.
Despite what Dorian may have believed, I wasn’t helpless. It took hours, but eventually, I managed to break the binding. It was hastily done, so the contract inherent in the sigils had loopholes to exploit. When I finally managed to free myself, I shifted into my true form and soared up above the city.
I caught his scent quickly after that. In moments, my nose latched onto the scent of his blood. Using every ounce of my power, I slowed time to a crawl as I blitzed my way towards him. Even with all that though, I was too late.
I found him, dead, at an intersection of ley lines. His body surrounded by spiraling magical arrays, written in his own blood. What power was left in him sinking deeper and deeper into the magical reservoir. Then that magic bloomed. A wave of brilliant gold washed over me and then continued to spread beyond, faster than I could track, until it passed beyond the horizon. Shrieking, debilitating pain filled my body, and I could hear the past moons screaming together in my mind, wailing in agony. I watched on in horror as I shrank down once again, the lovely horns he had given me turned to ash in my hair, my tail withered away into nothing. I was human. An ordinary human.
Everything was ordinary now, just like when I was a kid.
I didn’t want that anymore though. I just wanted him.
For the first time in history, the moon had outlived the sun, and all I could do was cry.
Aoife
“The ritual was imperfect. Temporary. It lasted just long enough for tales of magic to fade into legend. Eventually, the spell wore itself out, and you know the rest. Cyrus, like other suns, likely believes that you’re being manipulated by the supposed monsters around you. He believes that your only fate is to serve him or become a threat to humanity. No in between. And there’s nothing you can do to change that.”
“So what do I do then? If it’s hopeless. If he’s guaranteed to win, what can I do?”
“You can try. That’s all anyone can do. Things didn’t work out the way I wanted, but as much as I wish I hadn’t, I did outlive Dorian. You two are fated to clash, but you aren’t fated to lose. Just because nobody has ever won before doesn’t mean you can’t be the first. It’s up to you, Aoife. I only wish I could do more. If I could’ve stopped him…”
I hugged him.
“You did everything you could. You loved him, and that means something. I’m glad to have met you, Alex.”
He hugged me back.
I’d try. I had to. If only so I could spend more time with Erica and Willow
“Oh, by the way, why can we slow down time, anyway?”
I could feel myself being pulled slowly back to consciousness, we’d have to make this quick.
“That’s simple, actually.” Alex was laughing now. “We’re ice dragons. We can freeze time. I would’ve thought that’d be obvious.”
I laughed along with him.
“Oh fuck off.”
My eyes fluttered open. I was in bed, my head resting on Erica’s chest. Willow was curled up on her abs, having returned to her normal size. Erica’s chest rumbled as she struggled to suppress a laugh.
“You tell ‘em babe.”
Careful not to disturb Willow, she reached around to scritch my head. I let out a reptilian purr.
We’d try together.
