His mother’s reputation in history was starting to make sense.
“How did she hope to defeat them?”
“She and her sisters began to breed a race of dragons to take down all the pantheons. If they were cursed to only birth monsters, they decided they were going to make the most of it and use us to battle them.”
“No wonder your childhood was bleak.”
Fire lit his eyes, turning them a vibrant orange. “You havenoidea.”
Was he serious?
“No idea what it means to be cursed? To bleed for the actions of others over something I had no part in? Oh, yeah. I have no concept whatsoever of whatthat’slike. At all.”
Falcyn winced as he realized how stupid he must have sounded to make such a complaint to her. An Apollite. Of all the creatures, in all the worlds, she was the only one who understood him. Who knew exactly his pain. “Sorry. Forgot my audience.”
She shrugged with a nonchalance he was sure she didn’t really feel. “It’s fine. I learned long ago that no one is immune from misery. And some of us, it stalks like its favorite bitch in heat.”
He paused to cup her cheek. “I’m sorry for all you’ve lost. Innocents should never be forced to pay for the acts of others. Each drop of blood shed by them is an indictment against the entire world for its heartlessness.”
She placed her hand over his as her eyes burned him with the depth of her pain and courage. His gut tightened as she met his gaze and he saw the truth inside her. Saw the horrors she didn’t dare speak about because they hurt so much that to give voice to them only crippled you more. So the only way to survive was to bury the agony so deep that you could overlook it most days, and to pray to the gods that you never cracked open the door where they were kept.
And still her gaze burned him deep inside his soul. “You were the first dragon made, weren’t you?”
He winced at a truth he never spoke of. Many suspected, but he’d never confirmed nor denied it. Not even Max knew for certain. A tiny, tiny handful of others knew, and they never breathed a word of it.
There was no reason to keep it a secret, really, other than he felt somehow responsible for all his siblings born to their demonic mothers.
As if he could have stopped it had he been a better killer for his mother and her sisters. A better dragon.
Xyn had shared in that. She’d been born only a year after him. Together, they had tried to placate their mothers’ wraths.
And failed miserably.
The gods made vicious enemies, and the two of them had been bonded by their efforts to rectify the hatred. Bonded by their scars.
“Falcyn?”
“Yes. I was first.”
Medea swallowed at those whispered words. Her poor dragon. She couldn’t imagine the nightmare he’d been through. Her own was staggering enough. And here in this one moment, she felt closer to him than she’d ever felt to another.
“We are the guinea pigs,” she said with a sigh. “And as such, we’re always fried from the experimentation.”
He laughed bitterly. “True.”
With a ragged sigh, she glanced about the forest. “Where do you think the others are?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing. I’ve never been without my powers in this manner. It’s… irritating. And it’s not something I’m used to.”
She agreed. “We are such similar creatures, you and I.”
“For a Daimon and a dragon, you mean.”
“Both spawned by evil, to do evil. Like the Malachai.”
Falcyn considered that as they walked. The Malachai was one of the most evil demons out there. The king of them all, as it were. Luckily, there was only one of them left alive. The rest had been slaughtered long ago.
“Have you ever met the Malachai?”
