—Shaman Saphir Fatewever, to Kailin Strom
Morgateth caught a thermal drift off the southern ridge, letting it carry us upward in a slow, widening spiral, and for the length of the climb, I almost forgot to be sad.
That was his gift to me.
When we flew, the part of me that ached for Alar went quiet, not because it had healed but because there was no room for it. The wind took everything that wasn't the next gust and the next current, and Morgateth's strength poured through the bond and filled me, crowding out grief. But then we leveled off above the peaks, and the ache crept back in.
"Stop poking at it," Morgateth said. "It will not heal any faster for your attention."
"I wasn't aware I was doing anything."
"You were thinking and feeling loudly."He banked into a long, easy turn, his scales catching the light and reflecting it into my eyes.
I squinted."You're one to talk. You are consumed by grief."
"My riders are dead. Your Alar is alive. Besides, I do not poke. I let them lie where they lie."
"It's been a while, and you are still not healed, and you shouldn't give me advice on something you are not handling well yourself."
"As I said, our situations are not the same. I can't heal my wounds, but you can."Beneath his words, I felt the old grief move, banked, enormous, and never gone."Your prince is not dead. He is merely far away, and yet you mourn him as if you buried him."
"Elu forbid, but you are right. Sometimes it feels like I did."
He was quiet for a few minutes, and I thought he was done lecturing me, but I should have known better.
"Thankfully,feelings are not facts. You taught me that when you told me to stop blaming myself for the dead."He chuffed. "I'm merely returning your wisdom to you."
"And as you said, it's not the same. I'm not blaming myself."
"Yes, you are. You keep thinking that you sent him away by dreaming those death dreams about him, but the truth is that he had to go regardless of your dreams. His family demanded his return."
Morgateth was right, and surprisingly his reasoning helped. Letting go of the guilt eased some of the pain.
I felt his satisfaction ripple through the bond, pleased, as if he'd been aiming for exactly that.
It was the closest thing to comfort Morgateth knew how to give, and I appreciated it. He would never tell me platitudes because he knew they were useless. Regrettably, he also didn't say much about anything else because he wasn't much of a talker, and most of our flights were silent. I wished he could be more communicative.
"How is your shamanic training going?"he asked even though he'd asked the same thing yesterday.
He'd probably heard my thoughts about the silence and decided to fill it with this question because he couldn't come up with anything else.
"It's not as exciting as I thought it would be,"I said.
Saphir's lessons were not what I'd imagined a shaman's training would be.
I had pictured fire and vision and the weight of prophecy. Instead, I sat for hours in his office reading manuscripts so old the ink had gone the color of weak tea, while Moki dozed on the warm spot of sunshine on Saphir's desk.
The reaching into the minds of dragons was the only exciting part of my shamanic training. I could do that with ease when they were close by, but my ability faded with distance. Saphir believed that I could train myself to stretch it farther, and he had me practice with Nyxath, reaching for the queen of dragons across ever-growing distances, and learning to make my voice clear in her mind.
I was the first human in living memory who could speak to all dragons and not just my own.
The trouble was that living memory did not reach very far. The old dragons, the ones who might have remembered others like me, were all dead, lost in the Second Extinction War. The Elucians who survived had been scattered across the Elurian Federation for generations before trickling back home, andwhatever they'd once known about shamans and their abilities had faded and been lost.
Then again Saphir, who had been the head shaman before the extinction, didn't know about anyone like me either. According to him, even Elu hadn't possessed the ability to communicate with all dragons. He could only communicate with the one he'd been bonded to. But Saphir himself had admitted that most of Elucia's sacred texts had been destroyed, and that he might be mistaken about our God's ability.
Regrettably, Saphir remained adamant that Elu was flesh and blood.
"It's not a bad thing to be the only one of your kind,"Morgateth said, reading the thought before I'd finished thinking it. "I would know because I'm one of a kind as well."
