Chapter Text
“Garrick!” The scream comes shrilly through the bond, sounding unlike her, unlike him, and certainly unlike Chradh. I don’t know how he relayed the message—the panicked entreaty, really—with the voice of distress, and I also don’t have time to consider it. I do carry one thought: I need to get to them. All it took was my name. Just something about the intonation and I knew it wasn’t Chradh, even though technically only his voice comes through my head—it was Xaden. Or someone connected with him. (Aka, Sgaeyl.) And that’s an even scarier, more urgent thought.
Chradh banks left and I fight to keep ahold of the pommels instead of getting to reach up and adjust the snow-covered goggles giving me a great view of grey sludge and nothing else. Until he comes out of the steep turn I’ll just have to rely on his eyes.
When finally I can safely spare a hand I wipe the snow away, looking into the still-grey blizzard for signs of a blue daggertail shrouded in shadow and snow.
“Anything?” I ask Chradh.
“I’m getting us there!” he answers angrily.
I reach and push in my mind’s eye until the wind tells me where the mountainside is. We are getting closer by the second… and so is something else. I can sense it. Realizing why Xaden and Sgaeyl really called for me, I push up with as much force as I can, catching the fast-falling beast as firmly as my controllable gusts allow. Monstrous Sgaeyl falls still, a roar streaming out and shaking my core though I can’t even see her yet.
Chradh takes a dive and I lock on with my left hand, using my right to pull the currents of air and direct them against Sgaeyl’s underside. With the way this is going, I’m doing what has to be done as it has to be done—no time to plan or think. All I’m doing is slowing their descent. That’s all I can do. That’s all I can focus on for now. Lessen the inevitable impact. Lessen the inevitable impact, goddammit, Garrick! My muscles scream in tension as though I were holding Sgaeyl myself.
“Level out a bit— I need both hands.” I ask Chradh. Or tell. I dunno; hard to tell a dragon anything.
Chradh throws his wings out and we slow fast—I use that change and the inspiration of the slowed momentum, coupled with my concentration and use of both hands to detonate a geyser of updraft right beneath where I can feel Sgaeyl falling below. A few seconds later I hear a muffled series of thuds and crashes and what sounds like the splitting of arrows right where I was aiming to assist their crash landing. Chradh follows an unspoken plea to get down there instantly. Well… not instantly instantly. You know… instant landing is generally referred to as nosediving in our business.
The closer to the ground we get, the more my field of vision clears, darkening as we approach a massive swath of evergreens.
In a relatively flat part of the mountain landscape, sort of between two raised buttes, is a spot more dark and disturbed than the rest of the trees nicely dusted or speckled with snow. Downed trees mark a star shaped scar where it is clear our friends have landed. The snowstorm is in the clouds and peaks above us, giving this valley a much less chaotic feeling— the storm acting as its ceiling of sorts. We wade below in windless, cloudless peace, though snow still falls in flurries fit for light entertainment.
“Sgaeyl reports that her rider became unconscious after the swing of a wyvern’s tail caught his back, perhaps head. He is alive, but unresponsive,” Chradh reports as he circles to slow to a doable landing. He very infrequently uses Xaden’s name. Or any human’s, for that matter.
“Thanks,” I gulp. I dismount and sink to my thighs in snow, tweaking one knee when I try to preemptively turn from the position. Thats a problem I’ll have to save for later.
Chradh doesn’t much care for being stuck either, but lucky for him, he sinks barely up to his ankles. He lifts a leg and creates a path from me to Sgaeyl by drawing it in a zig zag motion, easy as me drawing a finger through sand. Then he lifts the same claw and plucks me up, setting me back on my feet outside of my personal sinkhole.
“Thanks,” I say again with a wince, feeling my already red cheeks heat.
I take off toward Sgaeyl next.
“Can I touch her?” I ask Chradh, ever wary of the matriarchal dragon, whether or not she is bonded to my best friend. It wouldn’t stop her burning me to a crisp.
“She gives permission for you to do whatever you need… in exchange for a favor.”
A what?! A favor is something that would mean someone would owe you…. I cannot imagine Sgaeyl ever allowing herself to be in that position.
“Retrieve the teeth from her wing, and see to whatever is wrong with her eye.”
Ok, wing—I can go that far. Eye? She has never looked at anything living with a glare that didn’t communicate, “I will remorselessly eat you for a light snack, even if I’m not hungry.” Of course I’ll do it… I just want to make clear… She’s f—ing terrifying.
I trudge along in the nice convenient path Chradh made for me, over to Sgaeyl. I still hesitate and look back to Chradh for confirmation when I reach her side, but he’s too busy preening himself like a f—kin songbird.
I turn back and focus, climbing up the dragon’s unfamiliar blue scales, cresting and having to hold on not to slip on her ice slicked back.
Xaden is passed the f— out, leaned all the way forward over the spiny pommels that arc in front of the scales that form his seat. Sgaeyl must have held him on with her power as they fell, or he sure as Amari wouldn’t be here. He looks so still… so helpless. It’s f—king terrifying, too. Because if Duke Badass can end up like this… what about everyone else we’ve brought into this war? If he can be this caught off guard, brought this low so instantaneously, then how much hope is there for the rest of us?
I blink hard and pinch the bridge of my nose to clear the pessimism and crouch to get to Xaden. The ice is making this much more difficult.
I grab the back of my best friend’s flight jacket and pull him up to sit. He’s still limp as a sack of flour. I balance and ease to sit next to him on the seat— or wherever I can get to. I tug so his shoulders rest on my thigh, and roll him to examine the wound that felled him, trying to stabilize his head in case there is a spinal injury. His breathing is raspy, but the pulse under my hand is as strong as I’d expect. Turning him over I recoil internally at the sight of the blood already covering my hand, evidently coming from the back of his skull. Shit.
I can’t feel any open wound beneath his dark hair, so I go lower, finding that the vertebrae on the back of his neck are lacking more skin than they should be. My chest releases a load of tension as I realize that that’s where the blood’s coming from. Better than a cracked skull. Much preferable. Still, it’d be a miracle if he took a hit hard enough to knock him out, at that angle, to the back and neck, and not have something vital broken. Gods, how badly I wish we just had a mender around all the time.
It’s not as if I can do anything, either. Especially not balanced upon Sgaeyl’s ridged scales. If I take off his flight jacket to investigate his spine, he could freeze. If I don’t, then I endanger us with the possibility that something more life-threatening could go unnoticed. Either way I can’t do shit on the back of a dragon.
I shift my weight and pull Xaden against myself tightly, allowing us both to slip off the dragon’s back and into the waiting snow with an anticlimactic noise. Sgaeyl in turn makes a noise I think I’d classify as concern, but Chradh’s head snaps to meet my gaze and I guess he reassures her once he realizes that that semi-to-not-at-all graceful move of mine was actually purposeful.
After re-settling and getting out of the trapping snow, I set Xaden so he’s leaning against his dragon, then set to work taking off his flight jacket. I think I read somewhere that being unconscious for this long is generally not a good sign… let’s hope that just meant for regular people. Not shadow-wielding uber-powerful dragon riders.
I only have to de-sleeve one of his arms to observe his spine under his uniform shirt. His ribs and vertebra are bruised, bad, and seem to have taken the brunt of the hit— which I count as a blessing from Zihnal, because if it had been his head and neck that took the most of it? I don’t think he’d be here. Well… alive here, anyway. Once he’s back in his flight jacket I stand, wiping his frosty blood onto my pants, cracking my knuckles and warming my hands with the little residual heat they have left in each other.
"You should probably get moving,” Chradh warns. I shoot him a look but lift my feet and stomp around to Sgaeyl’s arm where I’ve seen Xaden mount the ginormous dragon a hundred times.
She doesn’t move as I climb up again, but lets out a huff or perhaps a sigh when I reach her spine. I have to balance on all fours because of the ice, but I make my way to her left wing. Sure enough, proximal to the axial joint, there are two maybe three wyvern teeth and several more marks in the shape of a treacherous bite.
I muffle my gasp and shake my head, grimacing. Even without wings of my own, I’ve spent long enough bonded to a dragon that I feel a pang of (dare I say) empathy stab through me. I steady my footing, stepping slowly out to her shoulder, searching for purchase even with the slicked scales. On all fours again, I start to reach for the teeth. Then Sgaeyl moves her wing so that the last few moves I made to steady myself are f—ing useless and utterly wasted, because I can now comfortably reach the fangs from where I can sit on her back. I purse my lips and fight an eye roll by closing my eyes for a second. Jerk move, Sgaeyl.
“I’ll assume you don’t want me to pass that message along,” Chradh says with a satisfied sarcasm. I send an expletive or so his way and I swear I hear a laugh-like grumble.
Regardless, I have to be exceedingly careful with how I handle this wound; or else Chradh might be heading home without a rider.
About ten minutes later, I’m wiggling the third tooth from its perch. Another growl vibrates the body below me and I grimace, working faster and gentler. Finally, with three bloody, rotten, gigantic teeth on the snow below, Sgaeyl allows me to approach her eye. I still do so very carefully.
I am cautious, but I also make sure I’m appearing confidently to her. As if she can see anything out this side. There’s a pine branch stuck in her eye. Not spearing it, luckily, but making it impossible to close and certainly impossible for her to retrieve it herself. I let out a shaky breath and Sgaeyl snakes her head around to pin me with a look from her working eye.
"I can help,” I say assuredly. "If you remain still I can get the branch out without further damage." The use of the word “remain” there sounded clunky as f—, but I think my brain short-circuited and tried to go for dragon level professional language, ending up with disconnected sounding bullshit.
"She says you should do so.”
She swivels her head back around and her scales shimmer in the moonlight as her muscles relax and she burrows her neck into the snow to make the eye easier for me to reach. I myself also create a perch—a workspace in the snow.
I pull my water flask from my pack and say a little prayer for this to work before pouring a little into Sgaeyl’s eye. It twitches but she doesn’t move or flinch. I brace myself with a steeling breath and steady my hands on the pine branch (which is really more like a small tree) then lift her eyelid with one hand while I extract the limb with the other. Her golden eye blinks automatically, though it is still full of pine needles and stringy, bloody residue.
"Can I get the needles out?”
She tries to look at me but her stare quakes. Chradh translates her yes, but he barely needs to. I can feel it straight from her. From her stare, her lack of movement, her bated breath.
I pour more water and poise, holding her eyelid open with one hand and scooping out the pine needles with the other. No wonder this was an ultimatum for her. This is definitely the most helpless and creaturely I’ve ever seem a dragon. Of course they don’t want it to be like this.
And of course I’ll never comment.
Her eye watches me after a little while of being half rolled up into her eye socket. There’s something almost endearing or wondering about the look. I for my part try not to look straight into her pupil, the anxiety of being watched making me feel sweaty even in the weather.
After about ten minutes, maybe twenty, our little procedure is finished. And my hands freeze after a few seconds of not consistently moving. I pour water over them to remove the draconic fluid and it makes them legitimately freeze. I can see the frost growing between the glistening wet spots in the moonlight.
My next stupid idea is to shove them up my shirt. This (a) yes, does make my hands warmer, and (b) introduces freezing objects to the core of my body, which does not appreciate it.
I bite my lip and blow the pain out in a dissatisfied huff. I pretend not to notice as Sgaeyl blinks with what I imagine is a “what a pansy" moment. I stand and pull my feet out of the deep sockets they have come to inhabit in the snow and sigh as I turn away from the dragons; I take in a breath and the moonlit landscape of mountainous slopes glistening like diamond dust in the blue-grey light.
Chradh calls me back over to Sgaeyl’s other side and I fight the urge to bow as I pass right in front of her nose and gaze. I do end up doing a little bow of deference—I just can’t help it.
“Remove the human,” Chradh commands.
I do as he says, crawling over a fallen tree and sinking into more snow, having to fight my way out to get to Xaden. I drag him in a rut of Chradh’s architecture and design back towards the great orange cat of a dragon. I am not sure what he is going to do, but I have learned it’s best just to do what he says and ask questions later. Same thing with Xaden.
Chradh breathes in, that scraping noise I’ve come to recognize as the breath right before a pyrokinetic marvel takes place. I duck, crouching and covering myself and Xaden as best I can. Chradh also covers us with his wing. When the blast slows and then stops after quite a long moment, Chradh unveils the smoky, steaming clearing. Sgaeyl preens her joints which he just did her the kindness of heating for her. The ground between the dragons is devoid of snow, and downed trees all around us crackle as they succumb to encompassing flames.
A cold, cold wind shoots from the mountains and I have to cover my face against the ashes it carries over. Just the chill of it makes my teeth chatter and my eyes and nose burn.
Chradh covers us with a wing the other way, so we’re cut off from him but on the same side as Sgaeyl, and I hear and see his fiery breath, its light appearing like a cloud’s lining around his wing. He removes the wing and stomps a couple of times on the patch of ground by his front ankle he just fireblasted, doing a little dance to put out the lingering little flames. He does one more swipe with his wing for good measure, fluffing up ash and embers from the grass. I whisk them away with the wind and watch the glowing sparks turn to curled white filaments as they drift off into the night.
Chradh and I, and Sgaeyl, too, though I can’t really hear her side of the discussion, decide to wait out the night until Xaden awakens to be able to fly. If morning should come before he regains consciousness, we will try our best to secure him to Sgaeyl and she’ll hold him on during the flight back.
For now, Chradh appoints a position against his recently warmed front leg where we can lounge to wait for daylight or consciousness, whichever arrives first. I sit up against Chradh’s ankle, his dew claw just behind my left shoulder. I drag Xaden over too, and to conserve warmth, I just hold him from behind, my arms locked round his torso by the wrists. His head falls limply against my shoulder and I shrug until I feel like it’s in a more natural spinal position in case that matters for his condition.
As we settle down, Chradh lifts his wing up and covers us, blocking out nearly all the moonlight. He hinges a little opening near his shoulder and puts his maw to it, a fire growing in the back of his throat. He breathes a mercifully, springy, just plain balmy warmth into the little cavern he has created and I suddenly feel an exhaustion and a sluggishness replace the adrenaline and practical mindset I’d been using to propel me for the last hour. The warm air doesn’t smell great, but I’m so thankful for the heat that I barely care.
“Thanks…”
“Don’t call me smelly and maybe I’ll keep you warm all night.”
“You got it.” I smile slightly and feel my consciousness draining. Xaden’s heart pounds softly against my forearm and upon my shoulder, and slow, slow rhythm of his breath affords me the comfort to let myself slip into a mental darkness that matches the abyss like chrysalis we inhabit.
…,,,…
The first feeling I notice is comfort. Gods, I just want to stay here, wherever here is, and soak in the warmth and peace pressed against my cheek and wrapped round my shoulders.
But something abnormal in my position tells me this isn’t a regular morning and I’m not in my usual bed. So I slowly convince my eyes to open and my aching neck to move.
I’m definitely keeping in the same track: This is not normal. I don’t normally awaken with my head against someone’s chest. With their arms around me, as if I were a child they were supporting.
It freaks me out a bit, but my rational mind tells me to check who it is before I panic. That will tell me whether I’m dreaming as well.
I look up slowly as not to notify my protector and encounter pretty much the only acceptable option. It’s Garrick.
He’s sound asleep.