My eyes couldn’t stop breathing in every little detail of her. It was like that blur that surrounded her image in my dreams was finally sharpened. She smiled before she fell on her knees, and I heard her say my name.
“Theo,” she repeated. “Behind you.”
I turned to look behind me, and there he was. He was taller than I was. A fierce glow of red was taking over his eyes. The skin was coal-black, and he had vast wings that extended from his back toward the dying skies.
There was the surprise that I hadn’t expected. It is certain that when one is different from most of the people around him they think that they are the only ones who are different. It was hard for my mind to comprehend it at first, but there was no room for thinking about it.
The king was a fully formed black dragon, and, unlike me, he had wings. I immediately put Elise on the ground, and she hid in a cottage in the village. I turned my eyes at the dragon ahead of me and began running toward him.
He was faster than I was, his reflexes sharper, and he seemed to be much more comfortable with his dragon body than I was.
I leaped forward at him with all my might and he dodged me. The edge of my arms touched his body, and I felt that I had touched the core of a hot volcano. His coal-black body could have been actual coal that burned at the edge of his skin.
Our eyes met, and I felt that the human behind that dragon was grinning. He drew his head behind his neck, and when it reappeared, his jaws opened and fire began to flow out of it.
I tried to dodge the fires that escaped his mouth, but they seemed like they were going in every direction. My arm and half of my body was burned by his fiery breath. My skin began to fade where I was hurt but it regenerated quickly.
I leaped and my arms went to grab his body, but suddenly I found myself hovering above the ground. My feet were off the ground. His claws were sinking into my shoulders as his wings carried me up. My arms flailed, and I looked down on the village, glimpsing Elise on her knees by the cottage, watching me being defeated by this wicked king.
He soared high while carrying me, so high that the village was becoming only a dot in the scene my eyes made out. The mountains were underneath us, and suddenly he dropped me, so far away from where my love was. He launched a beam of his fiery breath on my back as I fell, and he flew back.
I saw the tips of the mountains growing larger as I descended on them. They looked like the sharp edge of a spear, and like that day when I fell on the valley, everything turned black.
What more could have given me the thoughts to loathe myself even more? When Bernard died, I ended up falling to blackness, and when Elise was taken by the king, I also ended up falling.
Unconsciousness in dreary times had become more than just a habit of mine, it became an inevitable fate. Endlessly I obeyed this heart-wrenching fate.
I despaired. My eyes were closed but my heart continued racing and skipping beats, necessary ones. I wasn’t fully unconscious yet, I couldn’t be. I tried to pull my soul back to living because I had to save Elise. But my body didn’t obey my heart. It fled instead.
I pulled myself up, my dragon form crumbling, one bit after the other. The rage was still firing within me, and my limbs were breaking in agony. I didn’t pay much attention to the pain that engulfed every part of my body. I was trying to rise up again, but I failed.
I found myself returning to my human form, shamefully, my head low. Weakness took over, and my consciousness began to fade. There it was again, the fate of the weak. Complete and utter melancholic blackness.
Chapter Twelve
Elise
It was a day before the king took me away from the village that I first knew of his coming. I was older, much more aware of everything my body was capable of doing. My first instinct was to be prepared to fight the king, along with the whole of his army. But it all wasn’t that simple.
It wasn’t an accident I had met the man who alerted me to the looming army. The man had found me inside my home and, without any introductions, warned me about the army coming our way. He didn’t say that much about the king and his army except that the villagers shouldn’t be warned, and that I shouldn’t fight them.
But he didn’t stop there. He knew me from before, and I knew him, too. He was the same man who had found me years before, half turned at the edge of a cliff, unable to handle myself. It was also he who had made me realize the value of that power that I bore within me.
I still blame myself for how things turned out for the rest of the villagers. Once the man had left my home, I found myself warning the villagers, and that was when they decided to set out an ambush for the front lines of the king’s army.
I wasn’t going to fight the king. I knew that all I had to do was to surrender myself to set my mother free. I didn’t think she would still be alive, and even though it was insane to be going there based on nothing but a feeling that she was there, I had to have faith in something, no matter how absurd it was.
And so I braced myself for what was coming once the sound of marching could be heard from afar. I looked through the door of the cottage, and I saw a man being dragged away by those who I knew as the Hawks. That was when I knew that the king was close. My heart pounded once I saw another man running after the Hawks.
At first I thought he was one of the villagers trying to stop the army, but his voice fell through my ears along with the endless spirals of nostalgia. It was Theo, and he was all grown into a man with broad shoulders. He fell onto the ground, and that was when I opened the door of my cottage, but I had to be more careful. I wanted to help him, but I knew that if I was found anywhere near him, they wouldn’t stop at just knocking him to the ground.
Before my eyes could see where Theo crawled, the king was by my door, looking at me as if I were some sort of prize. One of the Hawks with him grabbed me, and the other injected my arms with a liquid that felt cold in my veins. I felt myself staggering while being dragged.
I hadn’t expected Theo to show up. But what was even more unexpected was how he rose from the ground. I had thought that we were already on the way back to the king’s castle, but we were at an altitude. And all so fast, I was in his hands.
All my life, I knew that Theo and I were bound by the closeness of our hearts. Little did I know, that we were both cursed in the same manner, too. The way we loved the world was the same, and the beasts inside of us were also the same.
Chapter Thirteen
Theo
My mother used to always tell me that every man has his fate written in the stars. A long time before I was born, every little moment I would go through was paved. Many paths are set for every man’s fate, but eventually which path I took would be my choice.
I don’t know if I ever believed in the sort of predestination that Matilda believed in. However, her words were carved in the core of my heart and mind. She told me that throughout this fate and destiny that I would live, many people would come and go and each would serve a specific purpose.
She made sure to tell me that I wasn’t the center of the world, that people weren’t made just to serve their purposes in my life, but that their help to me was an accident of their own lives.
As I lay underneath the mountains, crawling back to consciousness, I thought of all of those things that she used to say. I was feeling the effect of Bernard’s words in every bone. I heard echoes of his voice.
“Weakness isn’t falling down. It’s failing to get back up.” I heard his voice through the mountains.
There was no change in his voice. It was as if it came from the very depths of my mind and resurfaced in the mountains. At the first moments of the haze, I looked for his dark figure around me, but nothing was there.
Was it too selfish of me to ask for help? Maybe, because I had Bernard, Matilda, and Elise, all contribute to the making of this soul that I bore within me. All of them, too, weren’t around me, but their voices and faces lingered on in my weary mind.
I had to find my way back home, and to t
he castle to save Elise. As reckless and stubborn as I was, I was thinking that all I needed to pursue my destiny was already within me, but I was wrong. And I had to be defeated by the king to understand that my power wasn’t as infinite as I thought it to be.
When I started making my way outside of the mountains, I was in agony. Physical pain was breaking me into pieces, but the anger that was raging within me was like a storm that I could never weather on my own.
I needed something to guide me, but I surely wasn’t looking for a guide. All I wanted was to go back, and that was where my body was leading me.
However, when I reached the village that was destroyed by my brawl with the king, nobody was there. It was as much a graveyard as every other place we had annihilated on our way there.
I walked around with a shoulder that was broken and immovable.
“Theo.” A man’s voice came from somewhere in the village.
It was too dark for me to see anyone or anything. There was one torch flame that was lit at a corner by the hills. I made my way there, knowing that the voice had come from over there.
There was a man sitting there, with legs folded and eyes closed. He was smiling, and once I arrived before him he opened up his eyes. I saw that he recognized me, and he even knew my name, but I didn’t know how that was even possible. At that point of my journey, with all the coincidences that had been falling on me, however, I knew that anything was possible.
“How do you know me?” I asked him, impatiently.
“Patience, son,” the man said and rose to his feet.
I began observing his face and felt as if I knew this man very well. I tried to recollect from my memory the place or time that I had met him before.
He had light skin. His eyes were a shade of hazel and his hair was blond and long, falling a little under his elbows. His beard was thick and his looks sharp. Everything about him reminded me of Seth for some reason, and a little of his character reminded me of Bernard. He had the same wit as Bernard and perhaps some of his humor.
Still, at that moment, I didn’t feel like I wanted to talk to anyone. All I wanted was to find my way back.
“How far are we from the king’s castle?” I asked him.
“As far as you are from sanity, son,” he replied, putting his hands on my shoulders.
I shook away his hands immediately and gave him a look of disgust. For all I knew, everyone was a danger that I needed to eradicate. I didn’t want to be stalled or to be distracted in any way from my purpose.
“If you aren’t going to help me, I’m off,” I said and began walking away from him.
“Theo, wait,” he shouted. “Don’t you want to know how I knew your name?”
I paused and thought of his offer, but it was the last thing that I cared about.
“Perhaps you guessed it. I don’t really care,” came my cold response.
“Son, you need all the patience that you can give yourself,” he said as he came behind me and again put his hands on my shoulders.
I turned around and pushed him as hard as I could until he fell on the ground. That was the moment that made me realize that he wasn’t a threat. The man laughed instead of taking my violence for danger.
I squinted my eyes, again feeling that I recognized his face from somewhere, but the blood was boiling in my veins. I clasped my hands once, and he jumped back on his feet.
“That’s what I was talking about, son. You need a little patience,” he told me, still as calm as he had been, unaffected by my wrathful attitude.
I knew that ironies followed me anywhere I went. I also know that there were times in my life where nothing made sense at all, but there was something about that night that made it unforgettable. But the irony flattened everything that passed in my life once I realized who that man was.
“I don’t need your words,” I replied. “Just tell me which direction to go and I’ll be gone.”
“Or else?” he provoked me.
“Or else you’d wish—” I said and hesitated, remembering Bernard’s words about when and where to put my anger.
“I was dead?” he added to my words. “Is that what you wanted to say, son?”
“I don’t kill people,” I replied, knowing that I had already been on a streak of killing.
“Is that right, Theo? You’ve been one of the king’s slaves, and you never killed a man?”
He angered me, and, suddenly I turned all my self-loathing toward him and attacked. I pushed him to the ground, and I laid several punches on his shoulders and chest, avoiding his face.
The man laughed as I let my anger seep out of me, and he finally held my hands so tightly that I couldn’t move them.
“Keep the anger for yourself,” he said. “Don’t waste it on me. You’ll need it for the king.”
He pushed me from above him, and that was when I realized that he had a strong body, yet he didn’t fight or seem to be proud of his strength.
“Tell me where to go,” I shouted, demanding an answer with every drop of anger that flowed in my blood.
“Ask politely, son,” he said, with a smile stretching his cheeks.
“Don’t call me son,” I screamed louder than any shout I had let out before in my life.
The man swung his hair until it rested behind his back. He walked forward and approached me until our faces were very close.
He punched my shoulder softly and looked me deep in my eyes and said, “Why shouldn’t I? it’s the truth.”
Chapter Fourteen
Theo
Too many questions were in my head. What truth was he talking about? I remembered the many stories that Matilda had told me about my father. She had said that he left us when I was born. She never told me the reason, though.
I always thought that I didn’t need a reason or any closure. Whatever reason there was, it meant nothing to me or to my purpose. Or at least that was what I thought. For all I cared, if his claim were true, I still loathed him. He left, and reasons don’t change that fact. This one end never justified its means.
He was bold, though, quite the character that made me want to stay and talk. Deep down, I wanted to know if he was like me, if he had the same odd body that I did, with the same kind of changes.
Before I even asked him, his answer came flailing above my head. As we walked around the village, he kept receiving my scornful rudeness with the lightest smile—he proved that he was my father in the strangest way possible.
“I saw you falling when the king dropped you,” he told me and let out a laugh.
“Wasn’t the first time I’ve fallen like that,” I said.
“I presumed so,” he said as eyed me from head to toe. “Speaking of which, where on earth are your wings?”
“What wings?” I asked him. “Do we have wings in our human form?”
“Sarcastic, just like your father,” he smiled. “You didn’t see the king’s vast wings?”
My eyes automatically closed. I dreaded the day that had passed, and I remembered how Elise was being taken away, powerless in the choice of where she’d go. I remembered her face when she was in my hands, putting all her faith in me, letting go of the need to struggle and instead believing I would save her from all that pain. The pain was beginning to feel like a burden on my heart, as if my back was going to break from the weight of my heart.
I turned to look at the man who claimed to be my father, and he looked like he was deep in thought or contemplation.
“If you want to leave, leave. I’ll tell you where the castle is, but know that I’m the only one who can help you defeat the king,” he said, approaching me.
“If so why haven’t you done that already?” I asked him, doubting his exaggerated confidence.
“I don’t owe you an answer to that. Guess you’ll just have to trust me.”
“I won’t gamble on the words of the man who chose solidarity over his family,” I aggressively replied.
He wasn’t helping me forget about his absence. Instead, I
was reminded of everything. I felt like I wanted to take my anger out on him. Not the anger of losing Elise, but the anger of losing Bernard. He was the reason I got attached to Bernard in the first place. He made me think of him as a father figure, want to listen to all his words, and eventually grieve his loss like a man grieving the loss of his limbs.
The kind of anger I had in that moment was odd. It was irrational. I didn’t know why I was feeling all of those things at once—I shouldn’t have been regretting anything. This became my conclusion later on, but for that moment as I thought of my own feelings, I saw a magnificent dragon that was claiming to be my father.
He had turned in the seconds that my mind strayed into thought. The transition was fast and smooth, unlike his skin. It looked dark and rough, black with streaks of red all over it, as if there blood stained his skin, a tattoo of his imprisonment in the world of killings.
With his long dragon arms, he lifted me up like I lifted the king’s carriage, and he soared with his long red wings.
The next thing I saw were the clouds in the darkness of the night. The moon was too close. I felt like we were going to land there. The stars were no longer the adornment of the skies, but they were figures all around us, possible destinations.
He took me to the top of a mountain, the highest in the range of mountains that surrounded us. The grass was green in the lowest part of the mountain, darker and browner as we went up. He explained that something called radiation killed the grass and keeps affecting it, even years after the dreaded explosion.
He turned back to his human form and began laughing briefly. He saw the look in my eyes that gave the impression I had just seen a ghost.
“I’m not scared, if that’s what makes you laugh,” I told him, all while looking away from his sarcastic and mocking face.
“I never said you were,” he replied and got closer to me. “Turn,” he commanded.
I was startled by his weird command. Who told him that I had a switch in my brain that made me turn when I wanted to? It was always a burst of anger that made me do so. And yes, I had trained by the willow tree for enough years to control the dragon form, but it was never that easy to begin turning.
Mated by The Alpha Dragon: The Exalted Dragons (Book 3) Page 5
