It was the king of magical beasts. It was proof that it was not humans who stood at the peak of all things that lived, but dragons. A darkness began to creep into the hearts of the adventurers and knights, sapping at their will to fight.
But then...
“Don’t give up!”
Alec’s voice echoed clearly across the battlefield, slicing through the despair and defeat that had begun to darken the hearts of those who fought.
“If we fall, then so, too, do the hundreds of thousands of innocents that call Torisval home! Stand your ground! We cannot let the Empire have its way!”
Under Alec’s bloodied chestnut hair, his dark magenta eyes took in the men and women who stood with him in battle.
“The dragon only has its magic left! It’s badly hurt and on its last legs! Do not let up the attack! We can win this! It will not be us who wake at the feet of the goddess today!”
Alec was a man who lived quietly. Such was his nature that he dressed himself in the plain and boring colors of the earth itself, as if it were his hope that perhaps it might hide his person from those around him. But in these words, in the voice that echoed across the battlefield, those around him heard hope.
If Alec’s younger brother, the king of Storydia, were the sun that shone brightly upon its people, then Alec was the earth upon which they stood. Nadia smiled and shed a single quiet tear—in Alec’s bearing she saw King Olivier, and the silhouette of her past fiancé, whom she would never meet again.
“It’s in his blood. There’s no escaping it,” said Zack, gripping his sword with his left hand. “Everyone in his family has that in them.”
Only Nadia heard these words, and though Zack had deliberately omitted saying a name, in his eyes was a nostalgia for a time lost.
He was a strong, stern man, and yet he was also sensitive and kind.
The kind lands, frenvary, that watched over its people.
Alec’s words buoyed his comrades, and together they found the strength to stand—the strength to fight once more. They drank what stimulants and recovery potions still remained, readied their swords, and cast their spells to keep the dragon down.
The monster howled. It cried out in hate at those who had forced it into darkness. It wailed at the sheer depths of solitude into which it had been forced. It roared with everything it had, refusing to return to that darkness.
Above the dragon’s head, blue and white sparks burst in a blinding flash of light, splitting the skies. Lightning sped across the dragon’s body, entering the wound at its neck and burning it from the inside.
The dragon convulsed, its pain beyond any utterance. Beneath it, Alec thrust his sword into the base of one of the stakes and imbued his blade with the strongest ice magic he was capable of. His giant makeshift weapon in hand, he forced open the dragon’s wound until finally, all those who stood upon the battlefield heard it—the sound of a joint breaking.
No longer able to hold up its own head, the dragon slumped to the earth.
It did not move again.
For a moment, there was only silence.
“Is it...over...?” asked someone.
“Did we win?” asked another.
“We did! We took out the dragon!” cried someone else.
The voices across the battlefield turned to cheers, spreading through all the people gathered. But as the dragon sank into a pool of its own blood, the booming voices felt suddenly distant, and its own rampage felt like something out of a dream. The magical beast was calm. Its blood, wafting with a magical chill, leaked from its body; it was as if the dragon were being released from the freezing cold of more than two hundred long years of torture. The magical beast waited, silently, for its time to finally arrive, and it was then that it felt itself gently wrapped in a quiet blend of fire and wind magic, which together formed a warm breeze.
To the dragon, the breeze felt like the epitome of spring, though it had never once in its life experienced the season. But even then, it imagined this warm, gentle sensation to be exactly like that of a spring breeze. The beast raised its hazy eyes to look upon the woman at the source of the warm gust of wind. It took in her black hair as it danced in the air. In her eyes was the wavering light of pain.
“You had it so tough,” said the man by her side.
He had not meant for the dragon to hear him. His words were like a whisper, so quiet it was as though his thoughts were simply slipping out of him. And yet, even among the joyous cries, the dragon somehow caught his words clearly. They were the only words of kindness that the dragon had ever known—words of comfort to go with the pained sympathy in the man’s gaze.
The words were so simple, and so fleeting, but the dragon had never once been shown such sympathy until now, no matter how much it had longed for it. And so, in the kindness that this man and woman shared with it, the dragon saw a vision of the parents it had never met. It saw its mother and father, their tender care, and the warmth of their kind words. Oh, how the dragon had longed to play under the sun, soaring the skies as its parents watched over it. How it had longed to sleep, to be at peace, with not a worry in its soul. Such were the dreams of a kind, compassionate world that swirled in the heart of the dragon—a dragon which had, from the moment of its birth, been made to live completely and entirely alone, as a test subject.
“Oh, you’re...” uttered the woman, her magic lifting some thought and emotion from the dragon’s heart. “You’re still just a child, aren’t you?”
The dragon had been locked away under the frozen lake when it had still been in its infancy, and asleep in that darkness, it had grown into its adult body. So while outwardly it was a fully grown adult, trapped within it was a tragic child, forced into the depths of solitude, where it would never have what it had most desired.
The woman brought her cheek towards the dragon’s, rubbing her skin against its own the way a loving parent might do for their child. Her hand rubbed the dragon’s face gently, the motion that of one lulling a child to sleep. And with her hand was another, a larger one, rubbing the dragon’s head in much the same way.
This warmth and comfort the dragon had only ever known in dreams. And yet here, now, it was reality. The dragon had believed it would meet its end trapped in the despair and solitude that had colored its entire life. But instead, it was being sent off with warmth and love.
There was nothing—nothing at all—that could have made the magical beast happier.
Now incapable of any utterance whatsoever, the dragon mustered the last vestiges of its strength to scrape free the scale beneath its jaw—the scale of an infant dragon, unchanged over all this time. It was a scale that dragons presented to their parents upon adulthood, when they were ready to leave the nest. In that scale was the dragon’s ardent wish that, in ending its story and returning to the flow of life, it might return once more to its parents.
Barely even aware of its actions, the dragon presented the scale to the man and the woman kneeling before it.
“It’s for us?” asked the woman.
Please, take it. Keep it safe. In it is a wish—that should I ever be born into this world again, it be into a place of warmth not unlike the one that the two of you share.
“Thank you. We’ll treasure it always.”
Upon those words, the dragon closed its eyes, and as it drifted into a peaceful slumber, it took two more kind words as its final memories.
“Sleep well.”
The darkness, once so freezing to the touch, felt warm now, and it was all-encompassing as it took the dragon into its embrace.
“May your dreams this time be bright.”
Shiori clutched the scale to her chest as she and Alec watched over the dragon on its journey into eternal slumber. Rurii and Violid stood silently by their sides.
And just like that, the echoing cheers of victory faded. Those who had been watching the dragon, and had seen it finish the rites that allowed it passage into a new world, offered their former enemy their prayers. They prayed for peace in the dragon’s next life, and they prayed that such a tragic story would never play out again.
And as they prayed, a small light danced in the clear blue sky for a moment before vanishing completely.