“I am not. You are weak. I should have kept my hand to myself.”
“I’m not weak.” Indignation wipes away any lingering traces of sleep. I rise.
“Stay,” he pleads, keeping my hand hostage. “I do not mean it as an insult… I smell your blood.”
After a moment, I drop back down. At being mentioned, my head throbs and I wince. “You can smell it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just a gash,” I reassure him because there’s concern on his face. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“I caused it,” he rumbles.
“I fell. I lost my grip.”
“When running for safety when I transformed.” There’s accusation in his voice.
True, but I don’t tell him that. The way he’s gazing at me, the way his brow furrows, it makes me think he’s profoundly unhappy about my wound. I don’t know how to take it. “I’ll be fine. And you’re—” my eyes widen “—you’re moving.” I sit up and check out his body.
He’s shifted. Now he is on his side with his arms reaching before him, the one that had taken my hand now placed palm down on the ground, holding his weight. And heisholding himself up, slightly, using his arm as a prop. His tails are behind him, and his other arm lies under his cheek.
I realize he’s been watching me. It would be easy to do so in this position. That he may have been watching for some time.
His eyes twinkle. “I am making progress.”
I scrape my teeth across my bottom lip.
“Your voice is clearer now too,” I say.
“It has not been used in many years. It is strange to speak again.”
I remember his unmoving dragon form. “How long?” I pull my legs under me and rummage through my scattered belongings for my rations of dried meat.
His dark eyes follow me. I know they do.
I can feel them like burning stabs.
“A long time,” he says.
“You were… When I found you, I thought you were dead.”
“I was sure I would die that way. Perhaps another hundred years or so, and I would have.”
A hundred years or so…
He continues, “But you came.”
I unwrap my dried meat and move back to Drazak’s side. “Hundreds of years is a long time. That isn’t close to being dead…”
“For a dragon it is.”
I shake my head. “So you’ve… been down here a long time?” I can’t even imagine it. “Hundreds of years?”
“Thousands, I believe.”
My lips part. My eyes go wide. “How? How is that possible?”
“Dragons are immortal unless something comes along and kills us. We will not die otherwise. But I have been starving, unmoving for so long… I was weakening.”
