Above all, the question is: why me? That question has haunted me, MiracleStar, everyone, for our entire lives. I have seen my own hateful, my own evil, my own suffering, spread out to touch and infect seemingly everyone I come in contact with. So has MiracleStar, Jaix, Skyil, and Taffin. We are a restless bunch, pained and torn by who and what we are. This could not continue. We could not slip through life living by a dagger and a whim forever. And so we found ourselves faced with a crisis, a breaking point in which everything tumbled down around us and we were forced to choose between the end of our pain and sorrow and keeping our family intact.
I could see his face again. His tears building under eyes that had turned to steel. But here, he walked away forever. I cried and cried for him to stop, but he kept walking, never vanishing into the distance, always staying just out of my reach. I ran for him, stretching out a pure blue arm, devoid of any stars, trying to touch him, to beg for his forgiveness, but I never quite made it. Something was holding me back. I turned and saw… myself. My haughty and spiteful gaze, the starry zafara body drawn up high, the dragon wings curving above my head. And I cried for her to let go, to let me go to him, but she refused. And I screamed that I hated her, no me, and still he left, never turning back, not caring, just as I didn't care then…
I woke. Just a sudden startled gasp and my eyes shot open, taking in the darkness and the pale light from the street filtering in through the window of my room. I lay there, gasping, my fur slicked with sweat and the sheets tangled in my legs and tail. A dream. Just a horrible nightmare. Deeply unnerved I untangled myself from the sheets, slicking back the fur around my eyes and I did so. I'd been having these dreams for months now, ever since we had gone on our ill-fated mission with MiracleStar.
I slipped out of my bed and padded over to the window, prying it open and slipping out onto the windowsill. From there I grabbed hold of the gutter and hoisted myself onto the shingled roof, barely noticing the cold beneath my paws. It was a crisp night, not too cold, but enough that I could feel the chill from beneath my fur. I settled myself upon the roof, gazing up at the stars. This was my favorite recluse, a hideaway from the world when things got to be too much, when the intensity of life was too much to handle. I would sit here for hours, staring off into the infinite heavens and I would dream. I would wonder about how things could be and how things might have been better. Hindsight is 20/20 and I was consumed by it. But I could not help it – it seemed my subconscious mind had a sick and twisted desire to force me to relive my past. I could have been happy there. I saw that then, how if I had only acted differently and seen from beyond my veil of hatred that I could have been very happy. I never would have destroyed myself and stained my paws red. And my dreams reminded me each night, in cruel detail, of what I had done.
I did not know what they meant. It seemed that our world had been dumped on ear and rearranged when we had stood by MiracleStar's side and told her that we would not let go. Something had happened down there, something that had changed me, her, all of us. Jaix had retreated into himself and I wondered just what was eating away at him. I had seen him in my dreams before, he had been chasing a star but each time had fallen short. Did he fear failure? Did he fear that he would not be able to protect MiracleStar – for surely that was what the star represented – from her own guilt and shards of past? I truly did not know. Then there was Taffin. He seemed twitchy, nervous, and overly protective. Again, I did not know why. Perhaps he believed that we could be torn away from him, for that was what it seemed each time it even remotely looked like one of us would come to harm. He had confided to me once that he had believed MiracleStar and I lost to him forever during that chaotic moment in that hateful basement. There were tears in his eyes when he had said that.
Skyil had drawn into herself entirely. She felt horrible guilt over what had happened, guilt that was only abated by MiracleStar's calm assurance that she deserved none of the blame. Our owner had even promised her that she would never make her use her talent ever again unless it was completely necessary. Only after that did she start speaking again. But I knew she still had nightmares for I could hear her cry out in her sleep at times, a single name, the name of the person she had most deeply wronged. An'feil.
MiracleStar herself, well, she had changed immensely. Her past had come to the surface in all its vileness and instead of conquering it as we had hoped she wallowed. It drug her down, day after day, every time she looked at one of us she remembered. I did not know what it would take to save her. I had hoped that by standing united by her side we would prove once and for all that she was not Kristen, that that self was gone and that she was something greater. It was to no avail. MiracleStar hated and blamed herself for everything, for all her pain and ours. The last blow An'feil had struck her was more an emotional mark than a physical one. She had taken it as her due punishment and decided that her place in life was to be despised. I despaired. She was MiracleStar, our owner, and the only person who could eventually save us and our family from destroying ourselves.
Me? How had I changed? I hated what I was and what we had done. It was a low and disgusting thing. I wanted out, I wanted away from this pain. I longed to just open the window and fly, fly away until the stars faded into molten dust and everything was no more. I wanted to be gone, for everything around me to die away into nothingness. I wanted to be reborn as someone else entirely with no past and a future that did no look so bleak. Simply put – I wanted to run. My family either hid or fought the past in their own way. I, I wanted to run away from it. And I reviled myself for wanting that as it was exactly that attitude that drove me to the Dragon Thieves in the first place, that attitude that drove me away from my original owner.
Oh, we were a mess alright. A horrible mess. But things could not last in that state forever. Indeed, the stage was being set for a radical turnaround, an event that would shake everything about us and bring MiracleStar to the glory she so deserved. We would be saved, but in the most unusual manner ever. I never saw it coming. None of us did.
I can only speculate how it happened. We had quite a reputation in the undergrounds of Neopia. We never left a trace of our work and yet we still managed to arrive at the market each day with rare and valuable items to pawn off for re-selling. We were admired, feared, and respected. That alone has significant weight. Also, we had worked for Malkus Vile and outwitted him to some degree. The people meant to take his fall got off scot-free. That brought an infamy of itself, coupled with the fact that Malkus Vile did not seek revenge and let us go without a blink. Some whispered that he even found it funny, that his scapegoats found a way out of the trouble he landed us in. The last strike against us? We had been pawns in Fyora's game. No, we were not pawns. We were wild animals loosed among the innocents. We had a reputation. A horrible and evil reputation, but that was exactly the kind of thing that reached ears like his.
We had help. There were people who were willing to stand by our side and declare themselves our friends, ready to fight and face destruction for the sheer act that they believed we would triumph. I think I understand why they did this now, that they saw in us redemption for not only our actions but also theirs. Mharen and Tharen saw it as a true act of nobility, as proof that the line of Echelon was not corrupt and that they held the spirits of true knights beneath their rough exteriors. Diganis followed us because she had nothing else to bind herself to. She had been stripped of everything of value to her and now she saw us as a means to reclaim some value to her life. And An'feil came because he too had nothing left, nothing but the duty he had been charged with and the duty that the Guardian Blade had bound him to. All of us were bound by our pasts in this. And it was those very pasts that would save us all.
The important thing is that when Losgadh'eolas released us from all bonds he set the groundwork for the breaking and healing of my family. We were free, completely, entirely, and we were completely lost in that freedom. Sometimes I wonder if he knew what I would choose in the end, when everything was promised and everything was taken away. But I diverge. The story needs to be told. I will start us off then, at precisely a week before the first stone was cast, that first little pebble that started an avalanche. Listen then, to my story. Listen to the end of the Dragon Thieves, and the beginning of something wondrous.