Embers of Empire

by Michaela Strauther

  “We’re alive!” he shouted. His voice echoed through the night air. “What are the chances? I was sure we were going to die down there, and look at us now! Hearts beating, lungs breathing, minds churning!”

  He charged to Colette and hugged her so tightly and with so much force that she stumbled, and then he released her, apologized, and ran to Sathryn with just as much force. He pulled her to her feet and encircled her with his arms, then picked her up and swung her around.

  Screaming playfully and beating her arms against his back, Sathryn found her wide smile was burning her cheeks. When had she smiled like this before? Had she ever felt the relief she did then? Nothing she could remember came close to being alive and breathing, nor did anything come close to the warmth of Julian’s arms wrapped around her against the cool night air, nor did it come close to the way he looked when he pulled away from her with his hands still at her waist. His face glowed from elation and from the moon’s silvery, delicate rays. The moon itself shrank away faster as Sutra leveled for the ground. Sutra was undoubtedly smaller now, and she was definitely not imagining it. His skin became less purple and more brown—the same brown as his skin—and his burned and battered wings were shrinking.

  Julian must have noticed as well. Frowning, he released her and looked down at Sutra’s browning skin and shrinking body. Sutra’s feet struck the ground in a reptilian form much smaller than the reptilian form they had begun in, shaking Sathryn, Colette, and Julian to their knees as his body grinded to a halt in the center of a circle of brick homes. None of the homes’ windows had the Dragon Kings’ insignia stained into their glass, nor did any of the citizens exiting their homes to look at the brown dragon and cluster of people that had fallen from the sky dress in elegant clothing.

  Julian slid from Sutra’s back, Navier once again over his shoulder, and the others followed behind him right as Sutra morphed back into his human form. His purple-brown scales sank and smoothed back into his skin. His long, black claws lightened and shrank back into his fingers and toes. His black eyes lightened into those of a normal human, matching the body he now stood in. But as soon as his body held no more evidence that he had been a dragon five minutes before, he collapsed onto the loose stone of the roadways. The warm torchlight around them illuminated his brown skin—and Sathryn noticed he was bare of all clothing, his royal robes and boots most likely ripped into shreds somewhere back in Kingsland. Along his shoulders and back were raw splotches of bright-pink, blistering skin—the product of his body being seared by his brothers’ flames. Nothing covered his skin save his curly hair draped along his shoulders.

  She felt as though she should stop looking at him, but he also wasn’t moving and was breathing too heavily, and that concerned her more than his bare body.

  “Is he okay?” she whispered to Julian.

  He shrugged.

  Neither she nor Julian, nor Colette or Etzimek, reached down to help him. Julian was carrying Navier, Etzimek was nursing his sore arm, and Sutra was—well—not wearing any clothing, so Colette, with Sathryn, waited for someone else to move.

  People, she noticed as she tore her eyes from Sutra’s slumped body, were staring at them all in both confusion and curiosity. Some of them called out, “What is going on?” in voices fresh from sleep, but most stood far off and stared at the fallen Dragon King lying naked and motionless on their streets—which region’s streets, Sathryn wasn’t sure.

  Until a young woman, dressed in a simple, white gown that almost dragged the cobblestone roads, stepped forward and knelt by Sutra’s body, no one dared to go near him. But once the woman sat and placed an olive hand against his back, and the people saw him remain still rather than rise and lash out at her, they crept forward farther.

  The woman called for a young man, who proceeded in peeling off the brown blanket he wore around his neck and handing it to the woman, who wrapped it around Sutra’s body enough to cover his bare skin from the nosy eyes of the crowd. Then, with the help of the boy Sathryn presumed to be the woman’s son, they pulled Sutra from the ground, slung his arms over their shoulders, and carried him toward a trimmed brick house.

  The sun was already beginning to creep over the hilltops, its color tinting the black-and-blue sky with soft yellows and oranges. The king was inside the house now, which meant the crowd of people that had gathered around the side of the road to see the legendary king’s vulnerable state diminished with disinterest, leaving Colette, Julian, Navier’s limp-but-somehow-alive body, Sathryn, and Etzimek all standing alone in the road with enough silence to force them to reflect on what had happened in the hours of the night.

  Colette and Julian walked toward the house, but Sathryn stayed and stared at the sunrise far in the distance. Etzimek didn’t leave her side. Instead, he gripped his hand in hers and stared off at the great expanse of sky, where the hills almost scraped the sun but never had enough height to reach it.

  Sutra

  hen Sutra woke up (a week and a half after he had fallen unconscious, as he was told later), a woman was standing over his torso and gently rubbing a green cream over the sore skin marring his chest, shoulders, and stomach. Changing into his second form and flying as far as he had sucked the energy out of him and made him weak—so weak that his skin was unable to heal itself as it usually did. Whenever he turned, it always overly exerted his body, but he was usually only unconscious for a few hours—a day at most—because prior to this incident, the most he’d done after turning to his second state was slash away at a couple hundred underarmed men in a raid on the castle. That had taken some of his energy, but not like this time.

  This time, he’d flown for at least an hour in his secondary state, and the whole time, he was keeping a very fast pace while dodging the attacks of his brothers. He’d also attacked them once himself, hissing out a stream of fire to distract them, before they all launched in the sky and fought together, and as he knew too well, fire drained energy faster than anything else. It was probably the main and only reason his brothers fell behind as much as they had—all they did was blow fire at him, draining their own stamina, and he had patches of red maiming his skin to prove it.

  The green salve dulled some of his discomfort, but his body was still stiff, and his skin was still tender. It had been over a week. The lady was dressing his wounds like she had done multiple times before, knowing exactly where all his burns were. And they did look much better than fresh burns looked. He grunted, trying to readjust himself on the stiff bedding he was on and the blankets he was under, and he quickly realized, to his discontent, that he was naked in a room with someone he did not know. At all. He’d never seen the woman standing over him in his life, and now she was dressing his wounds while he lay naked on her bed.

  She saw him stir and smiled. “You are awake,” she said. She had an accent.

  Sutra nodded. “I am.”

  “That is good. It means you are doing much better than you were when my son and I carried you through the doors.” At that, his eyes widened. Carried him through the doors? While he was wearing no clothing?

  “Oh.”

  The woman laughed. “Perhaps I should introduce myself. My name is Vera. You fell from the sky in dragon form a week or so ago—everyone saw it—and then became human again, but you were not moving, and you had blistering burns all around your skin. My son and I, we helped you up and carried you back to our home, and your friends followed us in. They are safe in another room. My boy even healed the beaten one and treated the burns as best he could. But they are worried about you now. It has been some time, and your wounds have healed, but it was uncertain whether you would live or die.”

  He chuckled to himself. Dragon Kings did not die that easily. She’d have to decapitate him if she wanted death as an outcome. Regarding the events, Sutra couldn’t recollect much. A week or so ago seemed like such a long time, and that was coming from the king who had been alive for four centuries. He remembered soaring through the air against his brothers and losing three behin
d him and losing the other thanks to the Ebony River, and he recalled feeling exhausted by the time they were far behind, but anything after that was lost. “Well, it’s only appropriate that I thank you, then. My gratitude goes to both you and your son.”

  She slathered the last of the salve along his bare chest, then produced a roll of white cloth from a dresser. “It was no problem.”

  Vera sat him up, then wrapped the cloth around his torso as gently as she could, careful not to wrap too hard around the burned skin. Sutra glanced at her. She was smiling. When had an average citizen ever smiled in his presence? “Do you know who I am?”

  She laughed. “Of course I do.”

  “Then why are you smiling?”

  Her eyes flicked up to meet his, then traveled back down to where her hands wrapped the cloth about him. Her eyes were large and slate gray. “Is there a new law stating that I mustn’t smile in your presence?”

  “No, but I have yet to meet someone who looks upon me, knows who I am, and yet still willingly smiles.” Except Anya. But she had been the only exception—until now.

  “I smile because I had always pictured the kings as monsters—very nasty monsters at that. But you . . .” Her eyes glanced up at him again. “You’re an ordinary man. You bruise and blister just as everyone else does, that’s for sure.”

  She finished wrapping him and laid him back down.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

  “For?”

  “For all the pain I’ve caused—my brothers and I. I used to relish the pain, but I’m remorseful now, and I want nothing more than to separate myself from my brothers.” Even as he said the words he realized how fake they sounded, even though he meant them. “Forgive me,” he added.

  Vera sat on a tall, wooden stool beside the bed. “What are you going to do?” she asked. She had ignored his confession—or maybe she just didn’t quite forgive him.

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you plan to do next? Will you allow your brothers to continue to rule?”

  It wasn’t a question Sutra had had time to consider, especially when he’d just awakened from the longest sleep of his life.

  He didn’t have to answer right away. There was knock at the door, and Vera went to unlock it.

  It was Sathryn.

  He was happy to see her.

  And when she saw him, she smiled. “You’re awake.”

  “So I’ve learned.”

  Sathryn handed a rolled slip of parchment to Vera, then she made her way to Sutra’s side. He tried to pull the blankets of the bed higher up his body as she approached him, and she didn’t notice at all. And if she did, she had the courtesy not to say anything.

  In fact, she didn’t say much for quite a bit. “Thank you,” she said.

  Sutra didn’t pretend to not know what she was thanking him for. “Please—it was the least I could do.”

  Sathryn smiled at the same time Vera’s face contorted into a frown.

  “What is it?” Sutra asked. She was holding the parchment letter tight in her hand.

  He grabbed the letter from her. The last thing he wanted to do was read anything—he was sure his head was being eaten from the inside out by the way it ached. But he had to read it, especially when Vera said, “I think the letter is for you.” The only writing on the parchment was a short, hastily written message. It wasn’t addressed to anyone, nor did it read who it was from.

  Somehow, Sutra knew anyway.

  To say our plight is over would be a tremendously pathetic understatement. And for that reason, I say our plight has only just begun. Be prepared.

  Michaela Strauther is fifteen years old and resides in Georgia with her parents and four brothers. She writes fiction and fantasy novels, but this is the first one she has published so far. When she is not writing or preventing her little brothers from eating everything, she is reading, acting, or watching her favorite TV shows.