He was angry, maddened, and before I could come near him, he took off flying and headed over the range of mountains. For a brief moment, I couldn’t tell what was happening. I walked slowly glancing at the graveyard of bodies that my father had left behind.
“What on earth happened here?” I said turning to look at Elise, but she wasn’t there.
I turned toward the house and there she was, standing by the body of my dead mother, crying.
I rushed toward her, unable to hold my tears before I was even sure that she died. I wouldn’t hear any last words from her or see another glimpse of her comforting eyes. There was only the coldness of her body. I lifted her off the ground, hugged her as her soul rose from where we were.
I was crumbling and my world was falling. Elise stood there frozen after many tears had escaped her eyes. It was my fault that she was killed. I knew that the king was looking for me. He must have known that I was the one who attacked the guards back in the castle and I was the one who took Elise away.
I was furious. Not a single cell in my body was at rest. I had lost her for good, and there was no way I could get her back. I remembered everything. She had told me that before a man dies, he sees his life’s most valuable moment flash before his eyes like comets in the sky. Every moment I had with my mother flashed before my eyes, as if a part of me had died.
“The sun rose,” I told Elise, with my face turning into a frown of rage, “He won’t live to see it set.”
And that was the beginning of the end.
Bernard had told me that my powers increase with the intensity of anger inside of me. And he was right. I felt that every muscle of my body was aching to turn. I didn’t fail my body, and in seconds I turned. For the first time, too, fire began flowing through my breath involuntarily.
Elise’s body began turning into her dragon form. Even in her dragon form, she was the most beautiful thing my eyes could see. Her skin was golden, and her wings shone as they stretched to shadow the village from the rising sun. We both flapped our wings and soared next to one another, heading toward the king’s castle.
Chapter Twenty-One
Theo
We were on the edge of falling when we found ourselves tied to the castle walls. Everything was falling, and this time it was for real. I looked beside me, and there was the body of my father, right next to the many bodies of the king’s army that had died from starvation.
It was a hell that burst on the whole of us, and I guess it was the impulsivity of my rage that caused all of that—and the king’s malice and dark need to have everything perish.
It had started when we were on the way to the king’s castle. From far away, I could feel the heat in the air getting hotter the closer we were to the castle. Usually, when we got closer to the castle on wings, we would see the high walls. This time, we saw fire coming out of a dragon’s breath. And it wasn’t my father’s breath that was fiery but rather the king’s.
I flew as fast as I could, shooting my whole body through the air and toward the coal-black dragon. Elise was behind me, fueled with a rage similar to mine and with the need to save her mother. We had decided to split up once we reached the castle, and so she went through the back to find her mother.
I pushed myself toward the king, and from afar I could see my father’s dragon body staggering. Something was wrong. He wasn’t as strong as he was back at the village. Suddenly, the sharp teeth of the king plunged into my father’s neck. He fell back on the walls, breaking them, and his body disappeared from view. He had shrunk, turning back into his human form.
I thought he died, and so I let the anger flow through me. I attacked the king, lifting him off the ground and away from the castle. I had to get him as far away from there so as to distract him from Elise.
He struggled to escape my grip, and he managed to slip from my grasp after flapping his wings hard. I found myself falling into the forests and saw him descend toward me, like a meteor falling from the sky. The fire from his breath burned the trees that were around me.
His face leaped toward my neck with his jaw wide open. A dark red liquid was dripping from his sharp teeth, but it wasn’t blood. As I dodged his attacks on the muddy grass of the forests, some of that red liquid fell on my arms and burned. Not only did the liquid burn, but when I glanced at my burning shoulders, my scaly red skin was turning to the same color it is in my human form.
I rolled on the ground again as his fiery breath was drawing close to my body. I shot a blaze of fire on the tall trees behind him. They fell on his back, and for a moment, I had a leeway to fly above him.
It didn’t stop him for long. Seconds after I started flying, I heard his wings flapping and him shooting fire behind me. He was very close and much faster than me in flight. I had to maneuver my way through the skies, rocketing upwards when he was inches from me. With all the power in me, I flapped my wings and sped up. I looked behind me, and he wasn’t there. He had left the chase.
I immediately looked at the castle, afraid that he might have started going for Elise, but he wasn’t there. Instead, they were both high above me, two blurs. Elise’s golden wings shone in the skies, and the king was behind her, chasing her as she flew away with her mother on her back. I shot up to meet them.
Just before his teeth plunged into Elise’s body, I blocked the king’s way, and we both fell as she fled away. He was stronger than I remembered and I was much weaker than I thought I’d be. And so the fight between us continued.
I expected Elise to be there any moment. We would be able to take him down. I waited and waited, stalling as my whole body began to give up on me. I was hurt, every limb of my body.
When we both fell, the king hooked his claws in my left wing, tearing it halfway from my back. I couldn’t fly anymore, and so there was no way I could extend the fight or escape.
I needed to summon every bit of bravery from within me and face him with whatever strength I had left, and there was very little left. We fell very close to the castle walls. He was still trying to pierce through my body with his teeth.
The thought came to my mind, and I remembered how my father returned to his human form upon being bit by the king. It definitely had to do something with the dark red liquid that was on his teeth. I knew I had to do my best to avoid being bitten. Whenever he would get closer, I would shoot as much fire as I could to keep him away.
The power of my mind was intensely higher than that of my body, so much that it backfired on me. Something went wrong with my thoughts, something unexpected. I saw a bright light flashing before my eyes. It lingered for some time, I feared that it would stop me from seeing him. I expected him to take me down any moment, and so I just began flailing my arms and shooting fiery breath everywhere until the flash ceased and I saw my mother.
She was smiling and coming close to my face. Her face was whiter, and her eyes were glowing like the fierce morning sunshine. I knew it was some sort of illusion, a trick my mind was playing on me. I shook my head, trying to kick the thought out of my brain but in vain.
Things began to grow bigger once the image of my mother went away, and I was growing smaller. I saw his dark face retreat from my neck, the dark red liquid dripping on my body along with some of my blood. A blur rushed to conquer my mind, growing thicker by the second.
The blur stayed for a long time. I was barely able to hear or see. I saw a glimmer of golden wings and the dark red liquid again. Elise, in her dragon form, fell from above. I crawled to clear away so as to not be crushed by her. I was in my human form, and when she fell, she was in her human form, too. She drew a deep breath from the depths of her lungs, and her eyes met mine as we both lay on the grass of the forests, her mother’s dead, broken body crumpled nearby.
I could comprehend only little of what was happening, and that little wasn’t pleasant to my mind. He had defeated us again, and this time it was the end. I reached with my hand to touch Elise’s hands one last time. She crawled toward me, holding my hands, not tightly, for the
strength in her was fading faster than mine was. Our fingers intertwined, our eyes locked, and finally they closed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Theo
“Do you remember when the moon was so close to the mountains? We decided to run away from home and go to the mountains at night and touch the moon?” I asked her later, in chains.
“When you told me that climbing a mountain was just like climbing a tree but with more to look forward to,” she said.
“I hurt my leg. When we were close to the top of the mountain, you tripped and were about to fall. I turned back to grab your hands, and a pointy rock pierced right into my calves and I ignored the pain and went forward to catch you,” I said.
“And you wanted to stop playing with the rest of the kids because they made fun of how you limped after that,” Elise said, with brief laughter.
“Actually, that wasn’t why I wanted to stop playing with them,” I confessed.
“Are you kidding? Did you lie to me about it?” she asked me, trying to remember if I had told her the actual truth or not.
“The limping was a factor, but the real reason was—” I was saying, but she interrupted me suddenly.
“When they made fun of us. When you told them that you wanted to marry me someday and they made fun of you, telling you that you were weird for wanting to marry your sister,” she said and let out another laugh. “They really thought we were brother and sister.”
“They were dumb kids. We look nothing alike,” I said, hearing the shuffling of the chains linger on from her laughter.
“You know, I never thought you would actually find me,” she told me. “I even remember dreaming of you this one time. I was sitting by a well of water, and you came staggering. Once you saw my face, you told me that I was beautiful, but you didn’t even know my name,” she laughed. “It’s weird, I know, but for a week after that dream, I actually did believe that you had forgotten all about me.”
“I never did. Not for a single day. I even used to sit by the willow tree and think of you,” I told her.
“You know that I thought I was cursed with this all alone. I really did believe that I was the only one who had a body that could turn into an ugly beast, and that if you saw me like that several times, you would eventually hate me. That you would be scared to ever play with me again,” she said, with a look of reminiscent hopelessness in her eyes.
Tears brimmed her eyes, but she smiled.
If there is one thing that could be a testimony to love’s divinity, it’s that in moments where one is supposed to cry, one can laugh, if only the one they love is smiling across from them.
“Is that why you left?” I asked. “Because you thought I would love you less?”
“Perhaps I did, but I was also afraid that I might not be able to control myself with this much power and would end up hurting you.” She looked me right in the eye, and I hoped I could escape my shackles and kiss her lips. “Also the first book Matilda helped me read talked about power. How when one has power, one loses love. It made me think of King Harold, how he had managed to be the most powerful man in the new world, but he cannot love anything, not even himself. I believed that if I realized the power that my beast form gave me, I would become like him.”
“You were wrong, Elise,” I told her, and I wore a grin on my face, contemplating the irony. “About many things, actually. One thing Mother told me was that not all books are right, but we read them all just to know both rights and wrongs and decide which is which.”
She raised her head and gazed at the flickering candle on the other side of the dungeon we were trapped in. I didn’t need to look at the fire of that candle. I had her face to look at, and I didn’t know how much time I had left, so I used it all to embrace her presence.
My father’s body was right across from me. It was dark, so I could only glimpse the stillness of his body. He was dead, and so was every other rotting body in that cell. I didn’t know my father well, and as much as he wasn't a part of my life, the pain of losing him still weighed (heavily upon me).
Elise and I were patiently using every second that we could to bind our minds even more.
“You know the irony, Elise, is that you left fearing I would hate your beast form, and eventually I grew to become just like you. We were meant for each other. Every moment we lived together and separately led to our togetherness in the end, and that was the main thing you were wrong about,” I told her, and when I looked at her, I saw her face was becoming dull and sad from my words, sinking into guilt and regret. “Don’t regret anything, Elise. It never does any good to dwell on mistakes from the past.”
“How can’t I? All of this is because of me. We are here now, stuck in this prison cell, about to be killed by a king who knows nothing in this world but his own stinking desires and all because—” she said, and paused for a moment.
“Because of what, Elise? You think if you hadn’t left, all of this wouldn’t have happened?” I asked with sarcasm.
“Yes, it wouldn’t have. At least not this way,” she said in sadness.
“You’re right, but there are a million other ways this could have happened, and when I think about it, most of the other ways are instances in which this would have happened sooner,” I told her, trying to take away even a bit of her sadness and regret.
“At least we would have had more time to spend with one another,” she told me, “and together we could have protected Matilda from that dire fate.”
“You’re very wrong, darling,” I told her, thinking of Matilda’s words as I spoke to her. “Why do you think that she wanted to be protected? She had a few days with my father before she died. Maybe that was all she ever wanted. I know that is all I ever wanted for myself.”
“What do you want for yourself?” she asked me, confused.
“I know how sick this sounds, but this, right here, this conversation with you, your tangible existence right next to me. I feel that all the pain of longing and suffering that I went through wasn’t enough. I could have paid more just to be here and now with you, in this stinking dungeon, with the stench of dead bodies and that dying candle.”
“We could have had a lifetime of conversation and the stench of rotting animal skin if I hadn’t left,” she said, turning her eyes toward me.
Her face was shining from the candlelight that fell right above her. A lethal poetic moment invaded my mind, making me think that her face in that cell with the candlelight was more heart-warming than her face bathed by the blaze of moonlight, but it was the moment and not the place that made that difference.
We laughed after staring into each other’s eyes for a while. I never knew that so much could be shared in one conversation until that wretched night. There was more to us than just visiting each other in dreams. There was a love that was unbreakable by the dark red liquid that the king had used to suppress our dragon forms.
“I wouldn’t mind dying now,” I said. “I was served all I ever wanted.”
“Which is what, Theo? A holiday in the king’s prison cell?” she said mockingly.
“No, an honest conversation with the one I love, something a little more real than the dreams I had of you every night,” I told her.
“So, what now? We are just going to wait here for him to come and end us?” she asked me, in frustration and despair.
Her face was alternating hues as the sun’s rays began to enter through the holes in the walls around us. I wanted to touch her hand, to use something much stronger than words to ease her pain at that moment, but we were too far yet to close.
I used all my strength to pull the chains that were tying me to the ceiling but in vain. Both our hands and feet were shackled to the ceiling and to the walls behind us. No matter how much we pulled, we would never be able to tear the walls down. We didn’t have our dragon forms anymore, and any second, the king would come with his Hawks and inject us with that dark red liquid, poisoning our bodies and our strength.
Chapter Twenty-Three<
br />
Theo
Who could had ever imagined that even silence with a loved one means something? The minutes we spent awake but in silence felt like a cleansing of all the pain that the past had cast on either of us. She was so beautiful even in the moments where she was most in pain.
Every time the sun rested on her skin and the candlelight started becoming a banal existence, we would feel the loss of time. At any moment, we were expecting the king. But he took longer than we expected, so long that we began feeling the changes of our bodies.
Perhaps that was what he wanted, or at least we thought so. It started when I felt the flow of blood in my body become faster than what it was the night before. I felt anger again, and this time the anger was making my arms stronger. We hadn’t eaten or even drank water the entire time we were trapped there.
I kept pulling the shackles again, and this time it was working. The chains were getting weaker with every pull. Elise was beginning to fall asleep. It wasn’t like the sleep we knew but a different kind—the kind in which your whole body sleeps from its frailty but your mind continues dwelling on the fears that it has lurking within it.
Rocks began falling from the ceiling with every pull. I looked up and saw that the chains were tied to the ceiling on some sort of metallic ring that was fixed deep into the bricks. I heard guards coming from far, rushing upon feeling the quivering of the cell.
I didn’t stop pulling. Instead I pulled the chains harder and faster. The door of the cell was pushed open, and one of the Hawks kicked it. His glare fell on me as I pulled one last time with all my might. The sound of the cracking relieved me, freed my arm as the metal chains swung in the air above me. He was running toward me when I swung the chains as hard as I could, hitting the side of his head and knocking him out, a sound of key chains shuffling on his legs, and he fell right next to Elise.
Mated by The Alpha Dragon: The Exalted Dragons (Book 3) Page 8
