Spring. A plethora of new sensations and colors surround you, and for the first time in four weeks you decide to stop running – for surely the distances between you and her are enough. Two behemoth mountains, capped in the steel-blue of ice, flank you, their sheer cliffs offer a protection few things can. The ravine they form winds a path several leagues northeast and a forest of timeless oak and white-ash runs its length. You can hear the faint calls of wolves and goats as well as many other animals you cant identify. Suddenly you, of all things, feel small. You smile at the sensation. The Beors are every bit as magnificent as you remember.
The day passes quickly, you had much to busy yourself with. Like food: three large bears, and a few goats. You lick your lips at the memory, then stop, and force yourself to not feel the contentment of a good meal. Just as you have stopped from feeling any pleasure for the past half-century.
You look around your new home. Nestled in an indescribably deep cut in the northern most ridge, almost five hundred feet in the air. The entrance eventually forms an ellipse though it is only noticeable from a distance. Your half bowl is against the back wall – a hundred-and-a-half paces from the edge. The granite made for a perfect material to mold, you can still feel the heat emanating from the rock. You carefully maneuver the sapphire scale in your mouth and lay it on the rock in-front of you. Why do you feel the need to keep it? As a trophy? As a reminder of what could never be? You shake your head and curl tightly upon yourself.
Or maybe you keep it as a sign of hope.
Hope. The term is something you've never actually contemplated, for it is alien to you. How could you have felt hope when all your life has been spent in chains? You knew nothing but torture and murder – you were both the torturer, and the tortured, the murderer and the murdered. It is unbelievably scary to die, even a dragon as fearless as you is frightened of death. And so, as was just in His world, he made you suffer your own death weekly. Not truly death, for even His magic was not enough to bring the dead back, but close enough all the same.
You know not of hope. But you feel a certain joy for the future, whatever it may be.
Night collapses in on you and you dream.
Just unstructured shadows eclipsing a light, but something strikes at your very core. A thrum pulses from formless-shadow to formless-shadow, and they begin to dance. They split apart and dive steeply: Isolation's ever downward spiral. Then they twist and turn until a random sequence of spins and false-dives brings them together again: Fate's gravity like pull toward Wholeness. The shadows circle gently in an ever constricting, upward-helix: The Soul's elasticity allowing a closeness never conceived. The forms finally touch, then they coalesce and meld until only a singular malformed black globule remains: Chaos, nothing more, nothing less.
The dream breaks as a warmth rushes past you, right against your neck. You find yourself in a half-crouch, teeth bared and fire dancing in your throat. But you see nothing. Moonlight simmers against your scales, and a soft wind sweeps through the cave. With a huff you dismiss the sensation that had all but startled you, as well as the dream.
You lie back down, ignorant of the two glimmering gems beside you.