Silver Dawn (The Long Dream Book 2) by C M Debell

Author:C M Debell [Debell, C M]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2022-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

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She found Aarin nor far from the inn, sitting in the pool of darkness between the lights of the tavern and the fires of the mercenary camp.

He looked up as she approached. It was too dark to see his expression, but she did not get a sense that she was unwelcome, though there was something in his stillness that made her look up. But if the dragon was near, she could not see any sign of it in the night sky.

‘Silverwing?’ she asked.

He tilted his head, off towards the west.

‘Is that why you’re out here?’ It wasn’t, but she wanted him to say it.

He rested his chin on his knees, a pose so familiar from the months they had spent together.

‘Aarin?’

He sighed. ‘What do you want me to say? I can’t… I don’t belong here anymore.’

She studied his outline in the darkness, shoulders hunched. ‘Where else should you be?’

He didn’t have an answer for that, but he didn’t move when she sat beside him.

‘No one is pushing you away, Aarin. You are doing that yourself.’

He made a frustrated sound. ‘I’m not…’ Then, ‘You all expect me to be the same, but I’m not. I can’t fit back into a space that is a different shape.’

She waited, and eventually he said, ‘I can still touch the person I was. I still care about the things I used to care about, still feel the things I used to feel, but it is like looking through a cracked mirror. I died, Jeta. I remember it, the feel of it, of coming apart and being knit back together. We were there, in the heart of everything where all things are one. And I could see everything. All the links in the chain that ties this world together—our place in it, the dragons’. We need them. I thought I understood before, but…’ He shook his head. ‘Kallis thinks I am refusing to see the obvious. You all do. But I have memories in me now that stretch back thousands of years, and they are not all human memories. The dragons, they do not see things the way we do, or think the way we do, and I see the world now through eyes that are not solely mine. I am not the same. I am not free.’

His distress was real, and it hurt her because there was no comfort for it. It was the price he had to pay for what he had done, and she knew he would make the same choice again.

‘Aarin…’

‘It’s not just that. It’s not easy to see what I left behind, what that meant. What I’ve done.’

She frowned. ‘What you’ve done?’

Instinctively, his head turned to the west, towards the dragon. ‘I did what needed to be done, I know that. But I didn’t think about the consequences. I never imagined…’

‘What would happen?’ She had thought the same, in her dark moments, even in anger. But it wasn’t fair. Even if he had known, what else could he have done? And if he thought anyone blamed him for that, for this, he was mistaken.

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