That was the thing with anger. It had another effect on me—I turned. The first thing that happened to my body as I punched the tree over and over was the protruding of my spine. It hurt at first, but then it was almost like a necessary itch.
I had never fully turned, but I did get much taller, and the skin on my body grew red and scaly. Bernard told me that the anger inside of me was not enough for me to ever fully turn.
That day, he came running to the willow tree upon hearing my screams. He had powerful arms, so he could pin me down even when I was not able to control my own body.
“Theo, you’re a dragon shifter. If you’re going to keep letting your anger seep out of you, at least go down to the valleys where no one can see you,” he whispered.
“OK,” I said as my body began returning to its human form. “Why am I like this?”
“It won’t help you to know why you are like this, but I can tell you how much responsibility you hold for being you,” Bernard told me.
“I never asked for this,” I shouted and turned away, hiding my face in the bark of the willow.
“None of us ask for our fate, Theo, but it’s the fool who turns away from his.”
Sometimes, it would take me days of contemplating Bernard’s words to comprehend them. He constantly threw phrases of wisdom to me that went hand-in-hand with what Matilda used to tell me. I tried to make him have dinner with Matilda and me, but he always had somewhere else to be.
Bernard was the king’s blacksmith. He was the one who managed the making of King Harold’s army’s weapons. I learned that he was working with other people in the castle to create something they called the Tank. Because of that, many of the village’s youth and I had to go every morning to the mountains and dig for a certain kind of rock.
“Why doesn’t Bernard want to come for dinner?” I asked my mother as we started to eat.
“Because Bernard and I aren’t on the best terms, Theo,” she told me dismissively, seeming like she didn’t want that specific conversation to linger.
“I thought he gave you your books,” I said and instantly wished I could take my words back.
“Did he tell you that?” Matilda shouted and slammed her hands against the table.
“No, I figured it out. You both talk about the same things, so I thought maybe you read the same books.”
“Keep that to yourself, Theo. If anyone knew that Bernard steals the books from the king’s castle, death will be his one and only hope,” she said in a calmer tone.
I knew that my mother cared for Bernard, and it wasn’t so hard to figure out why they were on bad terms when I compared their speeches.
When Matilda spoke of war, she spoke of it condescendingly, hating its purpose and the essence of it. However, Bernard thought that war was a necessary evil. He still was ashamed of his indulgence in making weapons for war, but he kept his pride in control when he talked about it to my mother.
Still, I wished that my mother and Bernard had talked about it before the dreadful day came. Things could had been different, and something could have probably saved us from the suffering that came our way. I never saw Matilda cry more than that day.
It was like any other morning, except that the skies were more gray than usual. A hint of redness strayed around the rays of the sun, giving it the feel of gloominess.
I found Matilda sitting in a corner with a book in her hand. She was immersed in her reading, and I didn’t want to disturb her. I kissed her on her forehead and left the house to go meet with the villagers and head for the mountains.
The moment I left the house, the stench of the decaying animal skin flew into my nostrils. My whole body shivered as it did every morning when that smell engulfed my atmosphere.
There was something eerie besides the deadness of the skies. The streets, too, were dead.
Bernard had a wooden stand where he did handy work for the villagers in the morning before heading to the king’s castle. I went there to find him but he wasn’t there. A broken cart sat on his stand, as if he was in the middle of fixing it.
I heard whips cutting through the air and licking someone’s skin. I looked at the ahead and saw that a large number of the villagers were gathered around something. The king’s Hawks were there, taller than everyone else, and I could see the thorns leaping out of their masks and lurking over the crowd.
I ran, hearing the whip, thinking Bernard was being whipped and feeling the beating on my skin. I pushed through the crowd and squeezed myself in between them until I could see what was happening.
“You think it’s funny playing king?” one of the Hawks said as he looked down on what seemed to be a child.
The boy was crying and helpless. The whip fell on the child’s back again as he curled on the ground and closed his eyes.
It wasn’t Bernard, but at least Bernard wouldn’t have been as helpless as that child. Two little girls stood a couple of steps away from the boy and cried.
“Stop whining. You two are next,” a Hawk told the little girls.
I couldn’t hold myself back when one of the Hawks went to grab the little girls and pull them into the circle.
“Hey!” I shouted at the Hawk. “You think it’s funny beating children?”
The Hawk was startled by my words, and his eyes scanned the crowd looking for the source. I stepped forward to show myself. My eyes pierced through the eyes of the one Hawk who was pulling the girls. Suddenly, I felt Bernard’s strong arms pull me behind.
“Sh, this isn’t wise, kiddo,” he said and put his hands on my lips. “Take care of Matilda for me, and always remember to use both your fears and your anger wisely.”
These were his last words.
“Who the hell said that?” the Hawk shouted, still scanning the crowd.
“It’s me, you idiot,” Bernard said and faced the Hawks.
“Stay out of this, Bernard,” the Hawk demanded.
Bernard ignored the Hawk and picked up the crying boy. His mother was standing in the crowd and she took him in her arms.
“Leave the little girls,” Bernard shouted his command.
“Or else?” The Hawk smirked and lifted his axe from the ground.
Bernard’s hands were behind his back. My eyes were fixed on him. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hands as they grabbed something in his pants. He raised what looked like a bow fixed on a wooden arch. He pointed it at the Hawk and something shot out of it. Two small arrows sank into the Hawk’s eyes, and he fell to the ground.
Bernard fought no more. When the two girls ran into the crowd and the other two Hawks attacked Bernard’s, the pain in my back began. My rage seeped out of every bone in my body.
I saw Bernard turn toward me, and his lips told me something. He asked me to run, to go hide. I don’t know why I listened to him. I could have saved him, but I ran to the valley. I ran fast, forgetting the pain shooting through every bone in my body.
My head felt like it was exploding. My jaw moved forward, and my teeth grew sharp. I grew taller with every step. My whole body was larger, my skin scaly and blood red. I reached the edge of the cliff, and my whole body was turned.
“The wings will take you places,” I remembered Bernard’s words, and so I jumped. But I never flew.
I hit the bottom of the valley, and all I saw was complete and utter blackness.
Chapter Seven
Theo
Turning into a dragon had everything to do with anger and fear. Just like Bernard had said, I had to grow to control both.
There was a deep and dark void left in every time of the day. There were sullen moments of remembering him at first, but I realized that Bernard as I knew him never died. He was physically gone, but he still lived through the many thoughts that he carved into my brain. All the things that I could never forget would keep him alive in a world of remembrance.
It was easier to control my fears than it was to control the anger. I grew more familiar with my body. I understood how the process of turning could b
e a choice rather than involuntary—it had to do with how much anger I devoted to what kind of fear.
It was like a knot or a puzzle of feelings. I had to deal with my emotions in solitude. The willow tree was my sanctuary, and it was where all my toxic emotions were left for dead. I would stay or hours after the sun set, and sometimes I would fall asleep and dream of Elise.
I had always believed that dreams weren’t figments of my imagination like mother said. I felt the truth. I didn’t read it in a book. And every cell in my body vowed that she was present where my soul is present, but only when we were dreaming of each other.
Every time I would find myself in a situation in which my anger outweighed my awareness of myself, I would think of Elise. I would tell myself that if I turned in the midst of a crowd, I could be taken away where I could never find her again.
“I will find her, Mother,” I told Matilda one day. “I will search all the land someday and will bring her home.”
My mother would lift her gentle eyes from her book and would pierce into my soul with her look and say, “Son, there are lands that are no longer lands, seas that are as dead as our king’s heart, and men that have only tomorrow to look forward to. And you, my dear, you are hanging your hopes on a mountain of fantasies.”
Even though my mother knew more than any human who lived in our time, she despaired. I figured it was because she was dwelling in fear. She became afraid of dying and found nothing to comfort that fear, no dreams and no ambition. She told me that when one feared death, one had to wrap himself around his purpose, committing every breath to the purpose of making the world a better place. By doing so, their fear of dying served to inspire them instead of cast them into a shadowy corner, curling up in fear and counting the seconds until they pass.
I had to learn to stop listening to everything that she had to say. That wasn’t easy because she had always been the voice of wisdom in my life, and suddenly she had become a storm of hopelessness, briefly sending its winds toward me.
When the day came, I wasn’t aware of what was going to happen. It was drafting day, and Matilda was crying all morning until I had to leave.
“Theo,” she told me as I stood before her, trembling from the pressure of her tears. Her silence was struggling with her desire to give me her words. “If they take you, just promise me you’ll make your way back.” A round of tears burst through her eyes. “Everyone left, but not you, Theo. Not my boy,” she cried and held me in a tight embrace.
A tear fell from my eye as I opened the door and marched outside. My ragged clothes and the dried purple rose were my only company. But I was reckless enough to also carry with me the note that Elise had left me. I didn’t care if I were killed for it. Men who left rarely came back, and when they did, they were never the same.
The king’s Hawks gathered around the spot where they had killed Bernard. I was enraged, but I had to keep my composure so that I wouldn’t devour their bodies.
I saw many men my age behind the Hawks. Each one had heard their name called. Carriages from the castle waited behind the men.
King Harold was a man of power, and he knew exactly how to use the labor of men to his favor. When children turned twelve, he wasted their infinite potential by working them in the mountains, forcing them to find him the resources that he needed to make his power last. And when they grew into men, they would be drafted into his army, serving outside of the kingdom to expand it through central Europe and wherever his dark dreams lingered.
I knew would hear my name. When the inevitable sound of my name escaped the Hawk’s throat, and I walked the hopeless walk toward the carriages.
It was a sullen day, a melancholic sun, and for the first time in my life when the night fell, I legally saw the moon. It felt different being bathed by the moonlight in a carriage that smelled like the fear of the drafted youth.
“Aren’t you scared?” the man sitting next to me asked with a tremble of his voice.
“I am,” I replied with my eyes still fixed on the blazing moon, “but I’m keeping it inside for when I need it.”
He didn’t understand me, and I didn’t expect him to. Like Matilda always said, men can only be enslaved by a ghost. What they feared was a ghost, whether it was the king they never saw or the place they never went. They dreaded the unseen.
The carriages took us through the mountain ranges and in caves dug by the king’s men. When I saw the castle from afar, I remembered the time Elise and I decided to find the castle. We never made it. We couldn’t climb the mountains, and it took us hours to find the first-dug cave through many in the ranges of the mountains.
Still, it was one of the many things that I wanted to do again once I brought Elise back to the village. Seeing the bright flames that seeped out of the castle windows brought melancholy to my thoughts.
I was afraid of what could happen to Matilda. She had no one to protect her, and she was becoming quite indifferent to people seeing her with books. I had even found her reading outside of the house. Nobody noticed her, but if she had stayed longer, the whole village would have known that my own mother was a reader.
I caught a glimpse of the king’s cape hovering over the walls of the castle above. He was watching to see the arrival of the carriages that came into the castle.
The castle was huge on the inside. Once we passed the walls of the castle, my eyes were met by the vast fields that surrounded the castle itself. Thousands of men were sleeping, some under trees and some on the grass with their eyes bathed by the moonlight.
It was the first time I felt the effect of the king’s power in his own lair. Thousands of men were scattered in his yard as his cape flew over the walls above them.
Little did I know, I was about to be blessed with something the whole of mankind couldn’t dream of—I was about to hear the king’s voice. His face was hidden in the shadows that lay above us as we stood under the balcony of his castle.
Men who were slim stayed to serve in the king’s castle while men like me were taken out to the fields and given a sip of wine.
“Nothing is holier than devotion. Tomorrow I will accompany this great army and will scour the land and bring back home all that would make our kingdom great.” The king’s voice was deep and terrifying.
He spoke with such conviction and pride that it was hard not to believe in him. I figured that anyone who heard his voice must think him divine. Perhaps the villagers had all heard his voice. But I was sure my mother never heard it, nor Bernard.
Chapter Eight
Theo
The next morning, we all gathered at the stairway that bent down from the door of the castle. For hours, we waited under the scorching sun for the king to come down.
I met a man within the thousands around me who stood fearless among the shivering. He had broad shoulders and a scar that started from the top of his neck and went as far as the center of his stomach. His upper body wasn’t covered and neither were his eyes. They were fearless. I could see the rage that oozed from them, and I wished to know what fear was under that.
I hadn’t seen the man in the village before, and when I asked him where his home was, he looked up at me and said, “I have no home.” He paused while scanning my eyes and added, “Don’t we all?”
“I have a home back in the village,” I said, “right under the range of mountains and above the valley.”
“You had a home,” he responded coldly. “Your home now is wherever he takes you,” his raspy voice blurted as the king stepped down the stairs.
I couldn’t help but stare at the king’s face as he observed the crowd that waited for him. He had one eye that was blue and the other was a light shade of gray. One side of his face was burned and many scars surrounded it. His blond hair fell in curls on his shoulders, and his slight beard was like tiny thorns that protected his face.
It wasn’t how I pictured the king would look. I had expected something far more breath-taking, but I guess he took my breath away because of the power in his
eyes and the scorn that was like a shadow to his cape.
He spoke no words. He looked behind him at the crowd one last time before getting inside the carriage. The king’s Hawks told us to follow them, while other Hawks surrounded us, ensuring that none of us would come near the king as they led us outside the castle.
Our carriages waited for us outside. The slim-figured men who were supposed to stay at the castle drove the carriages. We reached a river that the carriages couldn’t pass. They drove us to the narrowest part of the river where there were rocks that made it a little easier to pass.
I stood eyeing the river and all that embraced it. A trout floated above the water, going with the flow of the river, and I knew that a fish that flowed that easily was dead.
I was caught in the admiration of the beauty of the flowers that erupted around the river. Some were purple roses, like the ones by the willow tree.
“Stand still and you’ll die, fellow.” A man’s hands fell on my back as his words shook me out of my contemplation.
I turned around, and the man who I had met back in the castle was behind me with a grin on his face
“They remind me of something dear,” I responded with sincerity, even though I thought no one could ever understand how I felt.
“You mean someone dear, don’t you?” he asked with assuredness, breaking my assumption into pieces.
My eyes wandered back onto the gaze of the roses. For a moment, I saw her standing there, her ruby-red hair falling around her and her eyes catching mine.
The man began walking away toward the rocks that were our way to cross the river. I walked behind him, slowly falling back into reality’s stillness.
“Her name is—” I said as I caught up with him.
“Do you love her?” he asked, interrupting me.
“I worship her existence. I wait for the night’s dreams like the flowers wait for the sun’s rising, only to see her blurry image in a dream.” The heartfelt words flowed out of my tongue.
Mated by The Alpha Dragon: The Exalted Dragons (Book 3) Page 3
