"Is that meant to cheer me up?"
"I'm not an entertainer. I'm just stating facts. I am the most powerful dragon alive save for Nyxath. There is no other like me. I have made my peace with the burden of it."
I smiled into the wind."Your sense of humor is coming back."
"There is nothing humorous in that statement. I am one of a kind, and that is a fact."
I wasn't sure whether he was serious or just teasing, but I let him have the last word because it cost me nothing, and in a way it was true that there was no other dragon like him.
I had a feeling that each dragon and dragonia felt like they were one of a kind. Alar had told me how vain Veynathei was, and how she thought of herself as the most beautiful dragonia in the aviary.
Which reminded me that I had a promise to keep. I hadn't reached out to Veynathei yet, and I was ashamed that I hadn't. It had just been too difficult, and I was too riddled with guilt, but now that Morgateth had managed to alter my perspectiveon Alar's departure, I felt more confident about meeting the dragonia.
I looked around for a place I could invite her to and spotted the cliff Ravel used to take me to when we were still flying together.
Morgateth didn't need to be told. He shifted his great body, a tilt that sent us sliding down the air toward the eastern face of the mountain.
I reached out to Veynathei, isolating her particular signature, that prickly presence of hers that was easy to identify, and addressed her directly.
"Will you meet me on the eastern shoulder?Do you know the peak that looks like its top was shaved off?"
"I do."Her answer came back instantly. "Why do you want to see me?"
"Because I made Alar a promise that I would check on you. Besides, we both miss him. We can do that together."
"I am coming."
Morgateth set me down on the broad shelf that was the shaved-off top of a peak."I will go hunting while you talk to Veynathei. If you need me, you know what to do."He launched off the cliff before I could answer, and the downdraft of his wings nearly knocked me flat.
I was glad that he left because I knew that Alar's dragonia wouldn't be comfortable with Morgateth crowding us on that shelf.
She arrived almost twenty minutes later, which was much longer than the flight from the aviary should have taken.
She was indeed beautiful. Her scales shifted colors as she moved, silver to pale gold to a hint of turquoise and a blush of pink, like light thrown through cut crystal, and she landed with a precise, showy grace that no other dragonia I'd seen could match. She was larger than the others too, larger thanany female but Nyxath herself, and I wondered if that was considered an advantage in dragon society.
I had a feeling that it was.
She folded her wings and regarded me with smart amber eyes.
"Hello, Kailin. How are you holding up?"
I smiled."As terribly as could be expected. I miss him."
She tilted her enormous head."Why did he tell you to look after me?"
"Because he cares about you. You were newly bonded, and he had to leave. That must be difficult."
"Of course, it is. But it's difficult for you too, and he didn't ask me to look after you."
I stifled a smile."Maybe he thought that since I'm older, I should be taking care of you."
"You are not older than me in years. Dragons just take longer to mature than humans."
"Ah, I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me."
I wondered why there had been nothing about that in all the lessons we'd had about dragons or the books we had read about them.
"I don't require looking after,"she said.
