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Title: In This Dream
This is a side story to the story The First. This story and the story from which it came both belong to me. Please do not take, alter, distribute, or archive either without my permission.
In this dream I see a city, a broken shell of civilization. Destruction was wrought there, fresh and clean and terrible in its perfection. Nothing was left untouched, unburned, unbroken. Those that survived were not the ones who ran but the ones who remained and moved deep into the earth where the beasts could not reach them. The survivors were the ones who disappeared to where they could not be found, could not be taken by razor claws or vicious, gnashing teeth.
The city fell all around the humans, torn apart by a plague of winged beasts like a swarm of locusts ruins a field of crops in their prime. The monsters were furious, bitter; they were hurt. The humans who had loved them all their lives had betrayed them, left them to their darkness when they needed light the most. Now the chas’kra, the mountain dragons, had taken their revenge with heavy hearts, knowing full well that the only things they were destroying were the things they loved most of all.
I perch there, looking out over the remains and wishing we hadn’t been to this city, too. Wishing that my people had not been there, destroying everything. Destroying her. She had lived in this city. She had cared for me once and once she had been my world but now there was nothing below me but the ashen bones of a city that had once thrived so beautifully. With its people gone or dead, its buildings destroyed and brought to smoking ruins the city was nothing but a hollow shell, a skeleton we’d blackened so deeply that the sun would never bleach its bones.
Not that it mattered any longer.
Without her there was nothing left for me in this place. There was nothing for me anywhere. I could hear the call of my brethren in the broken city, the last few chas’kra that had remained to pick through the rubble. They were all looking for survivors; though some looked futilely for those they had once loved so much others… others looked to finish the job we had begun that morning.
My heart broke to think of it, to think of the way we’d crested the top of the mountain pass into the First City. Dawn still trembled on the edge of the horizon, dripping over the edge of mountains across the valley bowl and spreading light the color of fire over everything. The silver of the buildings had burned with morning, the sky reflecting brilliantly on the side none of us could see then. No one had expected us to come so swiftly. No one had expected we would be insane enough to attack the First City.
They had loved us and we them and they had expected us to betray them as little as we had expected them to betray us.
But we did.
We tore their world apart at the seams. Our claws rent gaping holes in their buildings and trailed blood through their streets. The disease within my kind had turned our elders into killers without choice but the chaos we delivered was wholly our decision. We were angry, furious that despite everything we had done to help the humans, everything we had provided for them and everything they had done to raise us, we had been laid down so easily by them. We were appalled at the way they had thought to exile us from their homes and their cities; from their love.
It hurt her as much as it hurt me but though I knew that, I couldn’t help the way my temper flared at the thought of having to say goodbye to her.
I watched the ruins beneath me, placidly thinking these things, these gut wrenching, heart aching things and I wondered:
What would she think if she could see me now?
Heart in my throat I spread my leathery wings and close my eyes against the thought, preparing to leave this place. As I take my leap skyward I know that this is one dream from which I will never awaken.
