My feet slide from under me against the slick stone floor as I try once again to defend the gate, my home. I blink once, twice and my eyes struggle to focus on the liquid, making it so difficult for me to keep to my feet. I’m like a doe on ice.
Blood. Blood everywhere.
I gather my fire and release it with a bellow of rage.
… but nothing happens.
I roar again. This time, the sound is tinged with desperation. My fire is trapped inside me. I can feel it caught in my throat, unable to make its way into the air.
My head feels barely attached to my body. All I can focus on is the smell of blood, my blood, in the air. And pain. So much pain.
The room spins around me and my legs crumple. I can’t hold myself up.
And yet, they keep on slicing my flesh. I don’t know why they continue to focus their attention on me, slicing and slashing while the garden is now unguarded. The guardian has fallen. The gate has been breached.
I’ve failed in my duty. I deserve to lie here and succumb to the pain, bleeding out over the floor.
And yet…
I cling on, holding with all that I have to the ever diminishing circle of light in my vision as the world around goes gray. I must stay awake. Present despite the pain.
I can’t leave her. My mate. I cannot leave the gate unguarded either, but for the first time in many years, my first thought, my priority, is my woman, the one with the gold spun hair. She needs me to stay awake, to stay alive. Years ago, I witnessed what happened to a mated couple separated too soon. The soul-deep ache that never fades, a life of feeling unbalanced as though you walk through it with only one shoe.
I refuse to leave my Echo to that fate. She has other mates that I’m sure would try to fill the gap with their own bonds, their own love, but it would not fill the void.
The pain, though, it grows and grows until I’m lost in a sea of it. I have nothing left to cling to, no life buoy that isn’t out of reach.
I fall into darkness.
The fall is long and hard, not unlike the feeling I experienced as a hatchling after my dam threw me out of the nest without more than a two worded warning.
“You’re ready.”
And that was it. The wind hit my face as I flailed, my body dropping through the air like a stone. Gravity has no mercy and tears fill my eyes as my gut fills with a feeling of pure terror.
I fall and I fall and I fall until I can’t remember anything but the feeling of plummeting through the air. Fear wrestles with a terrible sense of inevitability, the vague knowledge at the back of my mind that says that eventually I will have to land.
Does it count as landing if you are splattered against the ground? I scoff to myself. Even inside my mind, it doesn’t matter. Eventually, the fall will end and so will I.
A terrible sadness fills my gut. The knowledge that I’ll never get to know my mate’s favorite flower and present her with a garden of them, or to gift her with the selection of crowns in my collection that would mark her as my queen. I won’t get to create a new life with her, or a future, or a family that would allow us to step beyond the shitty cruelty and loneliness of our pasts and create something loving.
But… my jumbled thoughts make little sense to me. I am a hatchling, falling from the nest my dam and sire brought me into. Too young for thoughts of mates. So why is my mind full of the images of a woman with a shock of golden hair and the brightest smile I’ve ever seen?
But the ground never reaches me. Instead, I drift in total darkness.
There’s nothing here, no sound, no sense of the world around me. And I feel that same overwhelming fear that I had when I was falling. It takes over until there is nothing but darkness and fear.
I have guarded the gate for decades, fought and won against many evils, felt their insidious powers running over me in foul caresses.
But I’ve never felt so frightened as I am here in the dark. Staring into the void.
Panic draws up in my gut and climbs into my chest. It clambers higher and higher through my body, passing through my limbs until it’s close to enveloping me entirely.
And then I hear it.
Out of the silence and the nothingness, a soft voice calls my name.
I’m not alone here.
