Daughter. Jörð’s voice is clear and loud, but within a second of hearing her call to me, she rises from the crack. She’s golden and bright and as powerful as ever.
“You’re alive!” I drop Axel’s hand and walk past rows of guests to draw nearer to her.
Her eyes are vast, and they’re also kind. Of course I’m alive. I told you I would always answer your call.
I close my eyes for a moment, and then I inhale deeply. “This is the best wedding gift anyone could ever give me. If you could please take all the voices away, and then you could deal with all that instead, that would be amazing.”
Her smile’s bright. I took my first vacation in millennia, and it was quite nice. I’m sorry it left you with all the demands.
“I mean, I didn’t do anything for them,” I confess. “I didn’t know how.”
Next time, I’ll have to give you more instructions. She looks around then, as if just noticing that we aren’t alone. This is quite a gathering.
“It’s my wedding,” I say. “But all the voices demanding things were making me go insane.”
Jörd lifts her hand then, and a rush of golden, light, bright magic flees my body and disappears into her. It makes no noticeable difference in how she looks, but I hope I’m done luminescing all over the place like a bizarre sort of radioactive nightlight.
“I thought I’d killed you,” I whisper.
She laughs then, and the sound’s radiant. “My child, you can’t kill me. I blessed those swords with my own magic. They could no sooner kill me than that egg could kill you.” She steps closer to Coral and brushes the top of it with one golden hand.
The egg begins to rock and twitch, and I freeze. “What’s—is it hatching?”
She needed but a bit of energy to ready herself.
“It’s a girl?” Axel blinks.
I can’t help my smile. I spin and crouch, taking the egg out of Coral’s basket and holding it as carefully as I can while it pitches and twitches, and then one tiny piece of shell cracks and falls away from the top. Then another.
Finally, in a rush, the whole thing cracks wide open and a tiny purple dragon with sky blue eyes falls into my arms, fluffy white feathered wings unfolding as she looks up at me. Who are you?
If I’m crying, well, it’s a human hazard. “I’m your mother.” I squeeze the little scaly, winged thing carefully against my chest, and I feel happier than I’ve ever been. “We are just delighted to meet you, Indigo,” I say.
“I thought we were going to name her together,” Axel mutters.
“Maybe I’ll let you name the next one.” Though I wouldn’t count on it.
He laughs.
“So do we continue the wedding?” my dad asks. “Or is this where we all just pass the baby around and introduce ourselves?”
I’d like to see your wedding, Jörð says. I can hold her for the ceremony if she’s too distracting.
There’s no way I’m letting my tiny little dragonet go. I cradle her in my arms while my dad pronounces us not-quite-man and more-than-just-a-normal-wife. And I’m not the only one with tears in my eyes when I kiss my husband for the first time, while holding our newly hatched little dragon baby.
It’s not the perfect ceremony I imagined, but it just might be better. After the losses we’ve suffered lately, regaining Jörð and meeting Indigo was exactly what I wanted.
“What about your vows?” Coral asks.
“Oh, no,” Asteria says. “This is all happening entirely out of order.”
I laugh, repositioning Indigo so her wings stop tickling my chin. “My whole life’s out of order.” I lift up our little baby girl so she’s cradled along my hip. “But I’ll go ahead and start. Axel, earth blessed and Azar, flame blessed, I hereby dub you Axar, king of the dragons. The two names are too confusing, and now you usually just take the one big old dragon form anyway.” I smile. “When you’re not being human to be near me.”
He holds out his hands and I pass Indigo to him, finally. I wanted to make sure she liked me the most before I passed her off. She tries to claw her way back to me, which makes me smile, but eventually, she lets her father cradle her.
“You and I had a very strange start,” I continue. “And then I had to teach you to kiss. It was a very memorable kiss, leading to us entwining, and then you promptly forgot all about it.” I snort. “But as that was my fault two times over, I suppose I’ll let it go.”
“I remember it now,” he whispers, but he’s too busy smiling at our daughter to really make much impact with his words.
