Dreadwing, prize wardragon of the Lord of Greyspire, is dead. None have been able to revive the beast, but Astrum Bonecaller—a once-renowned fleshcrafter living resentful in the onrush of obsolescence—claims he can succeed where all others have failed. And succeed he does: Dreadwing walks once more.
But the dragon is still dead. Bonecaller’s apprentice is the one who makes it walk, a puppeteer inside a dead puppet. And the longer they are forced to play Dreadwing’s role to keep up the ruse of success, the more the line between apprentice and dragon begins to blur...
5.7k, written for the Hot Wet Queer Summer ebook Jam.
I am looking down at the Lord of Greyspire, and he is staring back at me with wonder in his eyes.
“Incredible,” he breathes, addressing not me but the mage beside me. “I admit, I had little confidence in your claims, but this…” He shakes his head. “You have surpassed my expectations.”
“It is a pleasure to serve, my Lord,” Astrum Bonecaller replies, bowing so low his embroidered sleeves brush the flagstones. Aside from the Lord and his half-handful of guards, the courtyard is empty. Such lives it should contain instead watch and whisper from windows and walkways, staring at the space I fill, gleaming red and three times the size of their largest drafthorse.
The Lord of Greyspire reaches up and touches my scaled snout. His palm is so small and so cold, a slap of unwanted ice. I flinch. He frowns. He has the kind of face that grows uncommon cruel when he is angered; his smile casts a square mile of charm, but his frown carves him into a promise of brutal consequence. A shudder takes me from horns to tail, shivering despite the noonday heat bearing down upon us. My forelimbs buckle and it takes heart-pounding effort to keep from collapsing and crushing the Lord and his guards. He turns his glower on Astrum.
“What sickness afflicts my wardragon?” he demands. “You promised a full return to life and strength—to better than that. What is this skittish fever-twitching?”
“Resurrection is a delicate business, my Lord,” Astrum says, obsequious. “Dreadwing will require a good deal of careful tending in these early days—which I will, of course, personally provide—but you may rest assured that it will recover all its former glory and more.”
“See that it does,” the Lord says, sharp as the blade at his hip. “I have no patience for failure, and no tolerance for liars.”
He turns on his heel and his guard fall into step behind him, his tower crest on their cloaks silverbright enough to hurt my eyes. Once we are alone, Astrum takes hold of the great chain around my neck and yanks it with more force than any would guess his scarred and scrawny arms to possess.
“Come, Dreadwing,” he says. “Time to go to your rest.”
Back in the dragonhold, I swim in hot, dead flesh. It shifts to make way for my squirming form, parting beneath me in slick, grey layers until I drop, drenched and half-blind, out of the dragon’s upper palate to land on its limp and lifeless tongue. Yellowed teeth encage me, but not for long, for here is Astrum, prising them apart with metal rods; here is Astrum, grabbing my wrist and hauling me free of the creature I have spent the last hour puppeteering for him.
“Useless rat!” he spits, dashing me to the floor with a blow that sets my head reeling. A swift kick follows—I’m too slow to avoid it, and it knocks the air from my lungs. “Feeble, flinching worm! Forgotten, have you, that if his Lordship is displeased, you’ll be joining me at the gallows?”
“No, Master Bonecaller,” I gasp out. He cracks the ironshod base of his staff against my shins, sneering at the whimper of pain I can’t hide, and bends to grab the front of my shirt, sodden with Dreadwing’s dead blood. His breath is as foul as the inside of the dragon’s mouth, his teeth half as sharp and twice as cruel.
“You have but one simple task,” he growls. “Control the beast until I complete the true resurrection. Or are you too feebleminded for even such scut-work?”
My reflection cringes in his too-large pupils, ensnared in their bloodshot filigree. “I’ll not falter again, I swear, I—”
Astrum drops me. Wipes his palm off on his robes—finery, such finery he wears; ruby-studded veins of carmine silk, stark against ever-clean white, weave around pearl-fashioned bones. The mantle of a fleshcrafter. Countless wounds he’s stitched back together, and in the war he made the bones of the dead walk again, wielding weapons as if they still lived—a feat that granted him his name.
That was the war before this one, and this one has come to a treaty-laden halt. Astrum played little part in it: his walking dead could not withstand the mageforged weapons of our foe across the sea, and no-one in all Kadrain had any use for them otherwise. His slide into irrelevance has been protracted and painful—a suffering I wish I’d had the power to foresee before I, shining-eyed and hopeful, let him pluck me from my home and drag me hither and yon across the country, carving his magic into my skin and beating my own out of me day by day.
“Tomorrow, his Lordship will wish to see Dreadwing again,” Astrum says. “See it as it should be. As it was.”
“He will,” I promise. Astrum snorts. A particularly hateful sigil in the small of my back pulses, as if I need reminding that when it comes to doing what Astrum wants, I have little choice in the matter.
But he doesn’t do more than remind me this time. He leaves me in silence and darkness, snuffing out the lanterns as he passes. The portcullis gate rattles and drops with a metallic boom that echoes long and loud. The crash agitates Dreadwing’s fellows, who snort and snarl in their nearby cells.
I curl up by the wall, as far from Dreadwing’s corpse as I can—which isn’t far; this cell barely holds the beast it was built for. The heat of it rolls over me in irregular, skin-prickling waves. Even dead dragons run hot.
I could heal myself if I had the magic left. Make my ears stop ringing, my stomach stop aching, clear the bruises from my skin and the blood from my mouth—I could even undo the workings Astrum’s knife has drawn across my body if I wanted. That was my gift when I was younger. Fleshcraft, the same as his, strong before I ever learned a single sigil. I was curing sick sheep and fixing broken limbs with my bare and unmarked hands long before Astrum stumbled upon me.
Once, I was a prodigy, the pride of my village. Now, I am a drudge; not even a puppet, merely the strings, bleeding my life into a dragon’s dead flesh to make it walk again.
Another wave of heat washes over me, making me gag. I press my face to the miniscule cool comfort of the cracked stone wall and force myself to sleep. Tomorrow, I will be Dreadwing again, and as horrific as the inside of the dragon is, being Dreadwing is better by far than being me.
The meat of Dreadwing’s brain moulds to the contours of my body, fluids of thought and former life soaking through my threadbare clothing, staining my skin. I feel it only for the first few minutes, as I only smell and taste it for the same, then Astrum activates his working and the dragon’s senses become my senses. With Dreadwing’s eyes I see not dark brainmatter, but the bloodstained floor of the feeding chamber. With Dreadwing’s nose I smell not rotting dragonflesh and sickly-sweet magic, but the musk and acrid fear of the bleating goat chained to the centre of the room.
Dreadwing’s stomach growls. My stomach, somewhere far away but still sewn into my body, churns with the knowledge of what is to come.
“Good food will help, my Lord,” Astrum said that morning, to the Lord of Greyspire’s renewed displeasure at my continued trembling. “Fresh meat.”
So the Lord had this goat brought, with six others waiting in the wings should it fail to satisfy, and Dreadwing cannot digest anything because it is dead, but I must make the performance of eating anyway.
Behind the gates of the feeding room—a dragon in the throes of a devouring is not a beast whose jaws any sane person wishes to be in range of—Astrum and the Lord watch me, the Lord with hands clasped behind his back, Astrum with staff tap-tapping against the stone and the promise of another beating in his eyes should I fail.
I shift in place. It took less time than I thought it would to become accustomed to the balance and movement of a dragon—my early efforts in that regard pleased Astrum, however briefly. Still, I am clumsy. This body is not mine, and both it and I know it.
I lower my jaws, dry where they should drool, towards the goat, which screams—truly screams, as goats can—and fights its chain. Couldn’t be killed first—dragons will only eat live prey, thus I will only eat live prey. With Dreadwing’s ears I can hear its heart, racing fit to burst in its fragile chest. It smells awful. It smells like food. Dreadwing and I are both starving—it has not eaten since the day it died, and I have not eaten a real meal since I don’t remember when.
“Eat,” Astrum calls, gentle, as if encouraging an unwell child. He has never spoken so softly to me. “Eat, Dreadwing. You must regain your strength.”
He, of course, eats at the Lord’s table. The only thing he’s resurrected since we got here has been the contents of his overburdened stomach: wine and well-fed beef, crackling pork and fowl-within-fowl perched atop the mountainous bounty of Greyspire’s fields, and as my jaws close over the goat I picture that table, groaning under the weight of indulgence I will never know. Dreadwing’s teeth tear through hide and muscle, hot blood bursting across its tongue and I taste it, because the dragon’s tongue is my tongue. Within Dreadwing’s skull, I feel the distant clench and retch of vomiting as, raw and hot and half-alive, the goat kicks its last down my gullet. The rancid taste merges with that of my own emissions, clogging my mouth and nose. My thoughts scatter, and I can’t keep hold of Dreadwing’s body as I should.
The dragon collapses around me with a wheezing groan like broken bellows, the feeding chamber shaking as its bulk hits the floor. The Lord cries out—first alarm, then anger. Astrum is placating, explaining, excusing, babbling the way I do to try and avoid what happens when I fail. I can’t understand his words. I can feel the goat inside me, dead throat muscles using my magic and Astrum’s fleshweaving to operate their base function, pushing the half-chewed thing into Dreadwing’s stomach. Into my stomach.
From one eye: darkness and rotting flesh. From the other: Astrum looming over me, fury in every line of his bootleather face.
I close the Astrum eye. I’d rather stare at rotting dragonmeat than think about what he’ll do to me when he drags me from the safety of this skull.
When Dreadwing died, the Lord of Greyspire was distraught. No matter the war was won, no matter the treaties favoured his King and our country—his prized warbeast had fallen. All the others in his stable were human-raised. Dreadwing was the last dragon in living memory to be dragged, a snarling wyrmling already the size of a cow, out of the Scaleridge Mountains and chained to the will of a mortal man. For eighty years it had served, and now it was dead. How furiously the Lord’s ancestors must have howled at him for such a careless loss of their legacy.
He wanted a resurrection. The kind of magic fading from the world, the kind I counted as stories told around the hearth to pass the winter. Living magic. Heart magic. Breath and blood and defiance of death and none of his warmages could do it. The Lord of Greyspire and his father before him and his grandfather before that had spent their lives collecting mages who could kill, not heal. They had burned ships for him, laid waste to foreign armies, brought down fire and lightning from the skies, but they could not make Dreadwing’s heart beat again.
Astrum heard the tale when he was in his cups, as he was often wont to be at that time. He took to boasting to anyone who’d listen that if he served the Lord of Greyspire, the dragon would fly once more. That if he had been chosen to join that elite company of mages, Dreadwing would already be restored and returned to service. He was a fleshcrafter, a true one. Making the dead walk had been an impossibility until he’d done it—resurrection would be no challenge at all.
I don’t know if he really expected the Lord of Greyspire ever to hear of him, or if he was simply boasting to boast. Whichever it was, the Lord did hear of him, and had him brought to Greyspire, and me along with him.
He couldn’t revive Dreadwing, of course. No-one could have. Dead is dead and dead forever unless you live inside a legend. But reality never stopped Astrum, and he would have done anything to keep the Lord from hanging him for his lies.
Dead flesh cannot return to life, but it can be made to move. Astrum Bonecaller is a braggart and a bastard and I wish I’d never met him, but he is the last of the truly great fleshcrafters, which is why I apprenticed myself to him in the first place. And so he carved into Dreadwing’s bones and he carved into my skin and I climbed into the dragon and lo! what had died now lived again.
If I live til morning it will be a miracle. Astrum dragged me from Dreadwing’s mouth—vomit-stained, the phantom weight of the goat leaden in my gut—and beat me with his hands and his feet and his staff until I no longer moved or wailed enough to be worth beating.
“I should have left you in the stinking marsh I found you in,” he snarled, flicking blood from his fingers. “Worthless creature!”
He’s been gone for hours. Upstairs, eating with the Lord and making more excuses, spinning lie on top of lie. My tongue is thick with the taste of goatflesh and vomit. I cannot move without pain, so I simply do not move. I just lie there, staring at Dreadwing in the dark.
For all that my heart beats, I am as dead as the dragon is.
High summer rises over Greyspire Keep. Atop the dragonhold, I and Dreadwing and Astrum and the Lord stand overlooking the vast lands that somehow belong to one man. Green grass and the distant glint of a river; patchwork fields tilled by hands worn out with expectation, the sky above them vibrating blue. Dreadwing’s eyes, even dead, see with more clarity than mine, but it is my mind that names the shade azure.
Between us we’d make quite the artist.
“Your provision of better food has made all the difference, my Lord,” Astrum is saying. “See how much stronger the beast is already!”
The Lord of Greyspire lays his small, cold hand on my flank. Dreadwing’s flesh wants to flinch, but I do not let it. I have grown used to such discomforts as his touch, like I have grown used to devouring live animals and the taste of blood and encasing myself in the spongy walls of a brain that by rights should have turned to sludge. You can get used to anything if you endure it long enough.
“And today you will fly again,” the Lord says to me. There is a softness in his voice, somewhere between lover to lover and master to favoured pet. “Soon we will fly together, as we did before.”
A cramp compresses me, and for a terrifying moment, I cannot breathe. Nothing of my struggle shows in Dreadwing—Astrum has soundly beaten out of me the habit of letting anything of my real self show when I am inside the dragon. But the braincase is tight, squeezing, which should not—cannot—be. Brains are not muscle, they do not move, even when they are alive. Draconic fluid oozes over me, wrung out of the tissue in which I am embedded as if some strong-armed laundress disapproves of how much mind-water remains within it.
With such unnatural liquid trickling into my ears and down my throat, I move Dreadwing as Astrum directs. The top of the dragonhold is a large, flat circle of stone, a high courtyard fenced in with tall, square-topped blocks around three-quarters of its edge. At the bare drop is where I settle myself, the wind snatching at my scales. Its chill caress rings remembrance in my membranes—my wings flare out, ahead of Astrum’s instruction. The force of their expansion nearly knocks him to the ground, but he quickly masks his annoyance in the face of the Lord’s delighted clap.
“As magnificent as ever! You’d never know they were shredded to pieces.”
It is the one piece of real, true work Astrum has completed, the restoration of these wings. Enemy magefire ripped them apart, their destruction bringing Dreadwing plummeting to its untimely end.
“Now, Dreadwing,” the Lord of Greyspire says, as he removes my chain, “do not overexert yourself. Bonecaller has worked long to restore you. We would not want his efforts undone, would we?”
The Lord often talks to me as if I—as if Dreadwing—can understand and talk back. I wonder how much it did talk back to him, before it died. Dragons have no speech as humans do, but they are intelligent beasts. How long will our ruse hold, if the Lord and his wardragon had a more intimate connection than I can replicate?
He backs away, Astrum at his side, their absence a gap of relief around me. Little enough time I have to savour it: the perilous drop calls. Walking on dragon legs is one thing, but wings are a limb-set I do not possess, and I am not certain I can do this.
I must do this. Thanks to Astrum, I have no choice but to do this.
I have seen dragons take flight before—not often, but I have seen them, taking leave for war. They leap from some high place, powerful legs coiling and exploding beneath them in a burst of strength, launching them into wingbeats that can tear down a house. Two or three such beats and they are aloft.
I crouch. My magic—my life—fills dead limbs, crackling through Astrum’s carved sigils to enliven muscle and sinew, stitching my body to that of the dragon, and together we leap.
I had thought—feared, hoped, prayed—that I would fall at this juncture. That a human could never make a dragon fly, no matter how deeply embedded in its brain. That I would fail and Dreadwing would plummet from the dragonhold, its skull shatter like an egg and me along with it, the yolk of my body splashed on the walls of the keep. Astrum would hang for it—or perhaps not, perhaps he could talk his way out of it, blame all failure on me, even in death.
But Dreadwing does not fall. Instead, we rise.
The cramp within the braincase has subsided, replaced by a feeling of security. I could never fall, not held like this. Not with the wind beneath the shadow of my wings, carrying us higher and higher until Greyspire Keep is a dark speck below me. Oh, Astrum will be furious with me for taking such a risk, but neither he nor the cruel little Lord can reach us here in the azure expanse.
For the first time since I was thrust into this body, Dreadwing and I are in accord. I open our mouth and exult in a roar that tears my human throat to shreds. I don’t care. It feels so good to scream this way, to shake the sky and shatter the world with our voice.
Our stomach bubbles, our throat flexes. Wetness floods our mouth; not spittle, something more acrid, and on instinct we spit and roar again and the sound clicks over a strange hardness in the back of our throat. Heat sparks off our teeth and the wetness we have spat ignites in a billow of flame that jets forth from our maw, long and long again as our tail.
Below: distant cries of surprise, of delight, of fear.
We soar higher, loosing another bellow that fills my human mouth with blood. Clouds part to make way for us and, high in the cold, with steam rising from our scales, we inhale deeply and the taste of distant mountain snow breaks like glass across our tongue.
Those mountains, those long-lost mountains. Cliff wall of nesting caves, the rush and spray of the river below. The crunch of boots, the stink of metal, and the river running red, red, redder than the scales that split to spill the colour someone, somewhere, might call crimson.
This roar is not exultant, it is the wailing of a child ripped from its dead mother’s arms. This fire is not a triumph, it is vomit ignited, and I am not a dragon, I am a person inside of a dragon, encased in the rotting flesh of a dead beast and I cannot fly, I cannot fly, and if I cannot fly then there is only one thing I can do.
I fall.
Dragons are immune to fire. Flame can neither sear their scales nor char their flesh; even their eyes will not burn.
I burn. Dreadwing crashes through its own exhalations and into the ground and I do not break, but the heat, the terrible heat! I cook alive inside its skull, burned and boiling and my screams go nowhere, full as my mouth is with my own blood and the dragon’s dissolving brain. How much of it I ruin in my writhing I do not know; a slurry of it pours out along with me when Astrum wrestles me from the dragon’s mouth. I am naked, the rags of what were once my clothes stuck to me—melted into me, so I think, but no; merely stuck, blood and brain matter coating me head to toe like afterbirth. Would that I had come stillborn from the dragon’s maw. Then Astrum would have nothing to vent his ire upon.
“Useless whelp! Look, look at the mess you’ve made!”
Astrum grabs my jaw and wrenches my head around, heedless of my thrashing limbs. Somewhere between the fall and my freeing, Dreadwing has been dragged back into its cell in the dragonhold, and I stare in horror at the mangled body crammed into the dark space. Teeth are missing, some jagged where they’ve broken in half. Its forelimbs are bent at wrong angles, and the sharp white spurs of snapped ribs jut through its side. Sluggish blood seeps from the wounds where it should gush, and how did Astrum explain that to the Lord? The consequences of resurrection, no doubt. The price of magic. That he’s still standing speaks of how deeply he’s wormed his way into the Lord’s regard.
His hand cracks across my face. The familiar pain jolts me back to myself and the realisation sinks in that I am not afire. I have not burned. I am alive.
Despite everything, I am still alive.
“I’m sorry,” I croak. Astrum barks a dry and awful laugh.
“Sorry! Oh, you’ll be sorry, alright. Up with you.”
He hauls me to my feet. I can barely stand, stumbling as he shoves me towards Dreadwing. Its jaws are propped open with metal rods, the tongue glistening with pools of whatever fluid it is that makes dragonfire. Fumes distort the air above it, every inhalation scouring my already-ruined throat.
“In you go,” Astrum says, too calm, too sweet. I don’t want to get back in the dragon. I don’t need to; I’m surely of more use outside it, helping repair it. I dig my heels in. Astrum smacks the backs of my legs with his staff until I move. “I said in!”
I do as he orders. The dark hole in the roof of Dreadwing’s mouth looms, a dripping slit into which I once again contort myself. When this foul cavity became a familiar shape, I can’t recall, but it’s as accommodating as always, wrapping me in deadness, in wrongness; in wetness and warmth, close against my bare skin.
Usually, Astrum seals up the hole once I’m inside; a distant activation of the magic carved in bloody lines all over my body and in twinned sigils on Dreadwing’s bones. This time, he climbs into Dreadwing’s mouth after me and when he looks up, when he raises his hands, an old, cold fear rises that he’s going to touch me. Like this I am, after all, the way he prefers to touch me: half out of my mind and unable to escape.
But his hands are not dreadful, empty palms. He’s holding the tools of his trade—a long, white needle of bone and a skein of black thread. It’s only when he pushes the threaded needle into Dreadwing’s palate that my fire-addled brain realises what he intends to do.
“No!”
I start to wriggle free, but he calls on his magic and that cursed sigil in the small of my back burns hot as dragonfire, pinning me in place. “No! I’m sorry, I’m sorry; I’ll fix it, I’m sorry!”
Astrum ignores my pleas as they rise from begging to screaming. No, not ignores—marinates. He always liked me still, not silent, and up here in the dragonhold, no-one’s going to hear me. He sews and sews, each stitch carrying with it the weight of his power as he seals the hole shut with me inside. I can’t even see through Dreadwing’s eyes—the fleshcraft that binds us is his, the wounds I bear of his casting make me nothing more than a component in his working. Thus, held in place, I am me and the dragon is a corpse.
Once the final stitch is completed, he releases the paralysis, but it means nothing. There’s nowhere to go.
“Let me out!” My shriek is muffled by brainmatter, by the thickness of dragonbone and muscle and scale. I claw at the meat surrounding me, doing nothing but clog up my nails. “Master, let me out!”
“You’ll stay there until I can fix what you’ve broken,” Astrum says, the words dulled but clear enough. “You’ll stay there until I’m convinced you won’t fail me again.”
“Please!” I wail. “I’m sorry! Astrum!”
But he’s gone. Or he’s ignoring me. All I can smell is Dreadwing’s rot. All I can taste is the foul residue of magic. All I can hear is my own heart, my own sobs, my own screams.
“Let me out let me out let me out!”
Hour after hour, begging and cursing, weeping and wailing—and all of it futile, because the only thing listening is the ruined corpse of a broken dragon.
I cannot remember the last time I spoke to another human. I keep silent in Astrum’s presence, climb in and out of Dreadwing when he commands, and the dragon, restored to full health—to what lie of health Astrum can replicate—walks and eats and flies and breathes its fire for the Lord of Greyspire, who is more delighted by the day at the restoration of his beast.
I sleep in Dreadwing’s mouth. After Astrum finally let me out, any space larger than my armspan was too wide. Between the teeth, atop the thick meat of the tongue, curled in the drool my magic now conjures when it floods the dragon’s veins through Astrum’s sigils; here and only here am I able to rest. My heart beats heavy in my chest, dragon-sized. My performance is perfect. I am better at being Dreadwing than I ever was at being myself.
Astrum is no nearer to a real resurrection than he was when we arrived. He takes his frustrations out on me, as always, but his threats ring hollow. He needs me, now more than ever—if I die, his own life will be forfeit. It is a small power to hold over him, but a power I cherish nonetheless.
It’s autumn, I think. Bright sun, cold wind—it smells like autumn. Dreadwing can taste it, and our stomach churns. There is doom in autumn. Dimly, I wonder why. Dreadwing died in spring.
Two other dragons are chained out atop the dragonhold today, growling in a subdued sort of way, the sounds almost slurred. The doom between my scales and my skin increases. We have done this before.
Astrum stands beside the Lord of Greyspire, their heads bent together in low conversation. Bosom companions, now that Astrum has achieved the impossible. Bold companions—the Lord’s guards are nowhere in sight, and have not been for weeks. What need has he for guards when his wardragon is there to defend him?
“Quite perfectly timed, Bonecaller,” he praises now, and Astrum dips his head, oh-so-modest.
“You flatter me, my Lord. Perhaps the turn of the year simply aided my own efforts.”
“Whichever the case, today will be a momentous occasion. The first eggs of a resurrected dragon will fetch a high price indeed!”
The Lord, cheery, takes hold of the chain around my neck and tugs me towards the nearest of the dragons; a small thing with faded red scales. A stench rises from it, artificial and sweet, compelling in a way that makes my gorge rise. It stirs arousal from a deeply buried place, dragging it forth with fishhook cruelty. My chain is secured to a ring in the stone, such that the length leaves me with no way to escape the readied creature before me.
Even in this body. Even in this body! Astrum can’t lay hands on me, no human could, but no human needs to. I am Dreadwing. I am a dragon. I am a beast, and a beast will do as a beast is bid.
Around me, what’s left of Dreadwing’s brain contracts. What a beast was bid left that beast a corpse. What a beast was bid produced offspring out of offspring, diluted blood, doused fire; docile pets with empty eyes, reflections of reflections of our own flesh staring back and back and back as if we wouldn’t notice, as if we couldn’t tell. Drugged and bred, over and over because that is what the Lord of Greyspire wants and this is what Astrum has done: he cannot hurt me in this body, but he can bind me in these chains, to this doom, so I can inflict on this flesh what he has inflicted on mine countless times.
My lips peel back, teeth bared in a snarl. The Lord smiles, his own teeth white. “Ready and eager as always, Dreadwing.”
He slaps my flank. My snarl deepens.
I will not rape myself.
We rear, wings wide. The chain tightens, the ring it’s fastened to creaking in its mooring. We pull harder, make the metal groan and scream and break. Our claws rake into the dragon below us, our bastard child, and hot blood sprays across our muzzle as it screeches, high and thin.
Magic tugs at our bones, burning in the flesh imprisoned deep within our skull. A stopping agony, a paralysing pull, strain and pressure like the air before a storm and then a dizzying aortic snap. The itch of a wound healing runs along the roof of our mouth as tears, hot with fury, streak scorch lines from our eyes. Fleshcraft. We have had enough of fleshcraft.
“Dreadwing, stand down!”
The little Lord and his little proclamations. His words mean nothing. We rip free the spine of the child of ours he intended us to mount and move on to the next. Better a quick death for them now than living long, distorted lives in service to lesser hearts.
“Dreadwing!”
Blood, thick with stringy clumps of muscle and sinew, splatters from our jaws as we whirl to face the demanding Lord and furious mage. Our claws gouge furrows in the stone as we stalk towards the pair. The Lord lifts an arm, toothpick blade glinting in the sunlight. It snaps and then he does, head bursting ripe over our tongue.
“You fool!” Astrum brandishes his staff at us. “Insolent wretch—what have you done?”
His rage is so pitiful. It has always been so pitiful; an old man spitting spite at the world to compensate for his own insignificance. Our shadow, serpentine and glorious, falls over him, and for the first time there is fear in his eyes. Too often we have seen ourselves cower in the dark mirror of his pupils; now it is his turn, long overdue. He stumbles back, unable, in his terror, to look away. Good. He made us. He did this. Well he should look upon his work, his grand miracle of resurrection, and see it for what it is.
The last thing he utters before our teeth sink into his frail flesh is a name. It is not our name. It has not been our name in a long, long time.
He comes apart in screams and slick innards, red and white and purple and grey, a mess of human gore. Some instinct keeps him kicking as we swallow, his death throes twitching, goat-like, down our throat. What magic he possessed dissolves into us, a brief spark of hot pain deep in our belly, quickly digested. Of Astrum Bonecaller there is nothing left but a splatter of dark drops on stone.
It is more than he deserves.
The wind carries us high into the azure sky. Ahead, the mountains rise, forest into stone into snow. Distant calls echo, half memory, half truth, the roar and reverberation of home. Below and behind, Greyspire Keep lies in ruins, burning as much as stone will burn—which, with dragonfire, is more than might be expected.
Our wings adjust minutely, our course along the river easy and clear. Small specks flee our racing shadow and we bellow, triumphant, exultant—we are free! We are free and we are whole and all our hurt is finally gone.
All our hurt is finally gone.