A rumble startled her. Lightning flashed again — from her this time. It burst from her skin in a series of bright, colorful flashes. Magenta. Apple green. Sunny yellow. A blue so bright, it was practically white.
She stared down at her body with a numb sort of surprise. Its pearlescent skin and flesh, glowing faintly even when the sparks died down, seemed unaccountably strange to her. She had seen so many bodies over the eons and she had dreamed of a miracle, where she might have one of her own, but now that it was a reality, she wasn’t entirely sold on it.
The being who stared at her made a chuffing sound before he showed her all of his teeth. He rumbled again, but this time it was quieter, and it did not startle her as much because she realized it was coming from the warmth she was pressed against.Him.
I don’t understand you,she thought, suddenly wild and afraid again.Oh, I want to understand you!
If she could not communicate, what was the point of being bound in flesh? If her muscles burned and her skin crawled, each nerve raw with its newness, why should she want a body?
Her fingers spasmed against the hard plating of her rescuer’s chest.Am I defective?
She made another high noise. Pain prickled every nerve and crushing disappointment made it hard to breathe the air she had never needed before.
Pressure surrounded her as he dropped his head down, close enough for her to feel warm breath on her cheeks. That coil around her ankle — she had anankle! —tightened, too.
He rumbled again. His lips moved slowly, but still she could not understand him. Why not? Was she broken?
She opened her mouth, desperate forsomethingto happen, but could only make a high noise of distress.
His expression darkened. Heavy brows snapped together as his rumbling ceased. Gently, he put pressure on her head until her nose pressed against the hot skin of his throat. When she was there, he spoke again, soft and slow, until she began to calm.
Again and again, she heard the same words, though it would take her a year to understand what they meant.
You’re safe,he said.I have you now, my fallen star.
ChapterTwo
They named her Hele.
Heh-lay.It was the first word she learned how to pronounce, and it meantlight.Her second word waswhy.
Constantin and Valerie, the recent empty-nesters who had taken on responsibility for her care, liked to joke that with her ravenous curiosity and habit of getting into trouble, she should have been born a cat shifter. Her hunger for knowledge was endless, and her rapidfire questions often surprised the dragons she met.
As curious as a cat,they lovingly teased.And as temperamental, too.
Hele didn’t quite get the joke, but that didn’t bother her. Her relief at simply being able tounderstandthem outweighed any slight she might have felt.
She remembered those first few days after her fall, when her Isand and the dragons claimed her as their own. The trip to the Draakonriik, what she came to learn was the dragon’s territory in the wider United Territories and Allies, was a blur of raw nerves and panic. They tried to communicate with her, but she could not understand or reciprocate. The more she tried, the more distressed she became, until Vael, the dragon who caught her, barked something in his low voice and hid her in his wings again.
She only felt peace in the shelter he provided.
He held her in his lap, strong arms banded around her trembling, unstable frame, the entire trip. When they eventually made it to the Roost, he still did not leave her side. Vael was the one who first discovered she did not need to eat more than once every few weeks. It was Vael who wrapped her in blankets and sat with her in a dark room until she settled. It was Vael who helped the Isand find a home for her — Taevas’s own uncle, Constantin and his Chosen, Valerie.
At first, she did not know what to make of him. Or any of the dragons, really.
Who were these strange beings? She thought she knew, once. Hele knew the shape of a dragon’s wings in the sky. She knew their roar and their blue flame. Over eons, she had seen them take their first flights and plunge to their deaths.
So she knew what theywere,but when she was her other self, they had seemed so small. Now they were mostly much bigger than she was. They were mind bogglingly complex. Their language was both beautiful and contradictory, their habits strange, their culture grown over countless generations she had watched come and go.
If she thought that she would be able to understand them simply because she had a body, Hele was sorely mistaken. Often she did not understandanythingthey did.
Just about the only thing that came naturally to her was flying, orwandering,as she called it. When she escaped into her other form, she and the dragons were in perfect sync. Her family marveled at her as she dashed across the sky — little more than a splash of color and light. They crowed with laughter when she accidentally triggered a rainshower, and they told anyone who would listen about how fast she could zip from one end of the lake to the other.
In flight, Hele was a natural. In the rest… she was less so.
Life, she quickly understood, was stranger than she could have imagined. It involved a thousand tiny decisions made in a second, context gleaned from a lifetime of conditioning, and the ability to read the people who existed around her.
She had no skill with any of it. Sometimes, in those early days, when she could not speak fluently, couldn’t understand what was happening around her, and struggled to withstand the bombardment of sensation that was life on the ground, Hele despaired.
