Unheard
Happy birthday to this story! It is already 1 year since the publication. "Time flies" as we say in my country.
She was in a room, like those of the base, four walls and a stone ceiling. But this was much larger than any room she has ever seen in her old base. It was so wide and so high, so much so that the boundaries in both length and height were completely invisible to her.
In front of her, arranged in a semicircle, empty stands that, as in an amphitheater, start from below to climb high, arriving where the light could illuminate before entering the darkness of the infinite ceiling.
Suddenly a door closed loudly behind her and the red dragoness jumped out of her scales, not expecting something like that to happen. She hasn't seen doors, but turning toward the source of the noise, she found a door in the middle of the room where it shouldn't, flying free in the middle of nothing.
Thum, thum, thum.
Three loud beats of what looked like a hammer against the wood drew her attention again to the stands and again she found herself in front of something that shouldn't be possible. Those stands were empty second before, but now they counted many, many figures, all faceless, but draconian, odd in their forms as they seemed all like black shadows with a white outline that defined them, no color in sight.
Completely out of the blue, the crowd passed from total silence to quite chatty, and soon, with the voices squealing over each other, the red dragoness began to get confused. She could not focus, the voices were so many talking at the same time as one, formed by multiple beings inside of it, its voice leaping from wall to wall, creating echoes, but at the same time rumbling inside the hall as if it were empty.
The red dragoness collapsed on the icy floor, her paws on her ears to try and lessen the voices and so the pain. Her face was scarred in a grimace that revealed sharp white teeth, her eyes hermetically sealed as if sound could come in from there too.
Thump, thump, thump.
Three more beats of the hammer on the wood and the voices stopped at once.
The dragoness slowly opened her eyes and got her paws from her ears, hearing nothing. She rose from her position, looking towards the stands, carefully as she expected the figures to resume their noise. But they didn't, limiting themselves to staying sitting and still in the stands, without a single voice breaking through the now asphyxiating silence.
Suddenly a sensation struck the red dragoness like a lightning bolt in a clear sky. A kind of sixth sense, or simply a foray or even a kind of fear. She didn't know exactly, she couldn't be sure, but something was telling her to raise her head and look towards the middle point of the stairway, that highest point at the center of the stands and up above toward the ceiling, where there was a seat a few steps from the invisible darkness and, sitting there, she could see a figure mostly like others. The only difference was that this shadow figure was holding what looked like cards and she could see a tail, one of an Earth dragon, loomed by its left side right beside a circular wooden thing.
Possibly the source of the thumps to placate the crowd.
A feeling of anxiety struck the red female at the sight. Not only did that figure look much bigger than her from that elevated position, but also the place, the atmosphere, the staircase, the seat... it all seemed so wrong.
"Defendant, one step into the light, please!" ordered a voice. It was rumbling, strong, strict, and commanded obedience even without knowing to whom it belonged to. Not that she wasn't sure of whom the voice belonged to, considering that the only figure standing was the one on the highest seat. But Fire was paralyzed by the almost transcendent voice sound, something so otherworldly and eerie that she didn't even think belonged to this world. But what surprised her more was the large circle of light that appeared a few steps in front of her as soon as the ethereal voice spoke.
The dragoness turned upward and tried to see the source of the light, yet she saw nothing but darkness up high. She turned to the light circle again, having the sensation that she was the "defendant" called upon but not knowing why. Still, she was far more worried about that strange light, as it simply came down from nothing, ethereal. She started worrying about what that light could do to her, to her scales, to her mind, but before she could even take a step back from that unnatural phenomenon, something pushed her forward and exactly at the center of the circle of light.
She yelped as she was shoved ahead, and she turned to see who did that, but she found herself squinting at the intensity of the light.
The commanding voice resumed speaking.
"Dragoness Fire, daughter of the fire dragons Flame and Ember of Warfang, Warrior of the Resistance, do you solemnly swear, before this court, to say all the truth and nothing but the truth?"
"Court? What court?" She thought. "Where the hell am I?" she wanted to shout.
Instead, completely out of her control as if she lost control of her own body, she remained completely unsuitable, sitting and staring toward the highest seat of the stands emotionless.
"I swear," she said.
No, she didn't swear anything! She can't do or say a thing! She was trapped in her own body, looking from the inside as if she were just a parasite in the life of another dragon.
"And do you swear to accept any punishment that this court will decide to inflict on you if you are proven to be guilty?" continued the voice, echoing in the room, making the guilty even more painful to her ears.
Still.
"I swear," she said, again, her voice empty.
"No! Guilty? About what?"
"Then let the first witness come forward," the voice ordered.
Suddenly a second light, just like the one above her, lit on a dragon figure, one of many, that in the semicircle was in the front row, slightly to the right of her central position. Her own body automatically turned to look towards that position from where, the shadow figure bordered by a white perimeter, rose from its position, revealing a completely defined and colorful dragoness.
"It can't be!" she thought and if she had control over her body, she would have been wide-eyed.
"Mother," her body spoke in a frosty tone of voice. It was her body and not her for she would never address her mother with that tone, not after the time she spent apart from her, worried she got her own mother killed and the whole base too, and not in such a situation anyway, where the pink dragoness was the only familiar figure she could rely on to understand what was happening.
Still, she couldn't help but shout in her own mind, trapped. "What the hell was going on in here? Why was her mother even here?"
"Ember of Warfang, do you swear not to tell a single lie in front of this court?" the voice asked.
The pink dragoness didn't look exactly different from how she remembered her: cold and detached, severe and straight in her position, her pink eyes penetrating inside her. But she knew something was wrong for one characteristic of her mother was that she always spoke with emotions in her voice, especially toward her, no matter how she tried to hide it. She would speak disapproval, anger, or harshness but her intent was always one of teaching. She always tried to teach her what to do, and how to behave, no matter how often they argued or she barked at her mother. Fire could always tell the reason behind her mother's sermon. She could tell both by her voice and her eyes, even if she tried her best to ignore that fact.
Here, though, she could only see coldness and emptiness in her mother's features and that was so unlike her, especially in such a situation.
"I swear," she replied.
"Get started, then," authorized the transdimensional voice.
Her body met the eyes of the other dragoness as the two dragons stared at each other in a race of glances, while the pink one spoke of her as if she did not even know her, the red one stared back with her body but screamed to be heard, to be freed, to end this from the inside.
Unheard.
"My daughter has always been a difficult dragon, your Eminence, since her very birth," Ember began. "She has always evaded orders, done things her way, acting behind my and everyone's back even when she knew well that what I was doing was only and solely to protect her. To protect my daughter. To protect my flesh and blood"
Until then, Fire could agree with her mother. That was the kind of thing her mother would say so she didn't worry too much to hear it for the umpteenth time the same thing she has been hearing for twenty years.
That's until the pink dragoness went out of line.
"But I can assure you, your Honor, this is by no means due to my inability to deal with my daughter. I have always been severe with her, teaching her education, respect, how to fight in a dangerous world dominated by the empire and its lackeys." Disgust visibly entered her mother's tone as she kept speaking. "I think, your Eminence, that all this comes from her lack of a father figure, not to mention her all too keen resemblance to her father, who was nothing but a coward!"
"No! It's not true!" she shouted from the inside grief taking her heart despite it being her prison while those words passed through her. Those words that her mother, her true mother, would never say.
"He was a weak dragon, your Honor, a weakling who got beaten by the purple dragon without even trying to fight for his own life, without even trying to fight for his own family," she spatted with cruelty, but her look remained emotionless, only her tone changed. And it hurt even more with the rumbling and echoing effect of the great hall, because it was as if the mother's words were a thousand times stronger, and repeated more than once, echoed in a continuous loop that was breaking Fire's heart, a piece by piece, to the ground.
"Mom, please, don't say that," she whimpered, but it was useless. Her mother kept spitting on her father's memory, and her body allowed her to do it, doing nothing to contradict her.
"It's all his fault that our daughter came out as we see her today, your Eminence," she continued as soon as the series of naughtiness was over. Now her tone turned to just disappointment, just as Fire remembered her real mother.
"It is clearly his fault that my daughter has accomplished the worst sin the world has ever had the misfortune to experience: betrayal," said, continuing to stare at her daughter in the eyes. "When she betrayed all of us, running away for her stupid little mission, in search of that failure of a father, in search of a ghost, a memory, only to then jeopardize her home and family and got her friends all killed, bringing the enemies right at our gates."
"No!" begged Fire from her silent prison. "Please, Mom, I didn't mean to. It was an accident, it was just a mistake, I didn't want any of that, I swear it!"
But her voice could not be heard, no matter how much she strove. Her body did not want to cooperate, remaining silent and sitting and letting her mother speak nonsense.
"And we must not forget also the sin of murdering one of her own," the pink dragoness went on, spitting with poison, eyes clasping on her daughter finally with emotion, but not one she would have hoped to see as her mother was giving her the worst look ever, something she had never seen on her mother's face. Never so much disgust on the face of one dragon, either.
"Mom…"
"It wasn't enough for her to risk her friend's and family's life once. No. She was murderous enough to do it again, betting her friend's life on the luck the Ancestors could grant her, taking her friends to imperial cities, risking being killed, or worse. Then she forced them on a stupid mission to save some unborn eggs, knowing that she wasn't fit to protect them from the dangers of the desert and the empire,"
Every single word her mother spitted to her as her body kept enduring it, destroyed a piece of her soul and it did it because it was true. Everything her mother was saying was true and it hurt, it hurt so much that, for a moment, a small moment, she was glad that she was kept prisoner in her own body, unable to speak. Because she would have collapsed, bursting into tears, showing the pink dragoness all her weakness, only enhancing her well-placed disgust.
But she couldn't do any of this. Instead, she was forced to keep watching and keep hearing, and here she saw for the first time the pink dragoness smiling maliciously towards her, raising her upper lip and revealing her sharp, shrill fangs in a clear sardonic, and disgusted smile. "Useless to say, her weakness and stupidity, turned this adventure, the last one for one of her friends. Or should I say, her best friend."
For the first time, her body decided it was too much to take and tried to argue.
"No! I didn-"
But she was cut off by her mother's rancorous voice.
"Sonohra's death is on you, and you know that you vicious viper!" the pink dragoness spat.
"No Mother," she tried but was choked by her own emotions as her heartbreak got worse, being unable to say a word, being unable to defend herself.
"Do you have any evidence for these claims, Ember of Warfang?" intervened the voice from the top of its seat.
"Better than that, your Eminence" sneered the pink dragoness, sending shivers throughout Fire's whole being, as her body visibly discomposed for the least of seconds, shifting to her sitting position. "I have the witness herself here who can tell the story directly to this court."
"What!"
With one last image of her mother with a satisfied, vengeful smile on her muzzle, the light on her died out, turning her back to one of the anonymous shadow figures in the seats. At the same time, a light turned on the opposite side, to her left, front row.
This time, however, the shadowy figure remained such, indefinite, without getting up.
"Sonohra, daughter of no one, Orphan of the Resistance, Warrior of the Resistance," resumed the voice from the top. "Do you swear to tell the truth to this court?"
"I swear," replied Sonohra's voice, but it was off, not like the voice she was accustomed to. She could not put her paw on it, but her friend's voice was a little lower than that of her mother despite the amplification of the room, the echo was more evident, however, making her words stronger as they echoed more. But a slight hiss was present in her friend's voice that she never heard before of her.
"Proceed with the testimony, then," authorized the voice at the top.
"There is not much more to say, compared to what the General has already said," she said, sounding calm. "Fire has always dragged us into her stupid and selfish feuds and projects, without any restraint for our safety"
"Sonohra, this isn't true, and you know that… Please!" begged the red female, feeling her soul breaking in two to hear her best friend speak that way of her.
"But that last journey was just…" she faded and, when she resumed, her voice lowered not in tone but in centigrade. "And, of course, it caused some side effects this time…"
"Explain yourself," ordered the voice, imperious.
"Fire not only was unable to protect us, her friends, those she personally put in that situation, from the dangers of the surface; not only did she cause the death of our entire base for her selfish mission." Again she stopped as Fire tried to listen without concentrating on her pain, the pain those words were inflicting on her like sharp throws cut inside her soul, one after the other.
"But she also led us to our death!" she growled as a poignant noise, like a chair being smashed and dropped to the floor, and then a disgustingly flabby noise as if something was walking on some kind of slime.
The shadow figure dematerialized and in its place, slowly from the dim light, came the figure of the white dragoness.
Both the Fire inside and outside couldn't contain their astonished and horrified reactions when they saw their friend:
The white dragoness was no longer so white. She had grayish scales, the few that were left since the others seemed to have fallen and rotten out. Her body was full of deep cuts that kept spilling blood from her wounds, staining with their red color both her remaining scales and the holes left without them, continuing their journey in several rivulets and then falling casually on the floor. Her wings, behind her, were visibly damaged and useless as they were pierced by holes of different sizes, while her face looked terrible, so much so that Fire, inside, desired in every way to look away from that terrifying show.
But she couldn't. She had to see this. That was her punishment for what she did.
She had to look at the face of the white dragoness, her best friend, completely disfigured. Her jaw leaned with two barely enough muscles to hold it to the rest of the body; her teeth were present and sharp, others broken and others gone; her tongue all too visible even until its attack in the throat. From the nose, black and swollen, came out blood, while the right side of the dragoness' face was completely gone, burned in a fire, including her eye, completely missing; her horn was broken but still attached with a small piece that left it dangling.
But the scariest thing for Fire was the look in Sonohra's only remaining eye. She had become a zombie, more than a dragon and it was a nightmare for her to bear. But it could still get worse and this deterioration was right in Sonohra's only eyes, dull and grayish, no longer as bright electric yellow as before, but laden with such anger, hatred, and disgust, that she felt her heart stop beating.
"She led me to my death!" Sonohra accused, roaring. "You killed me, Fire! You are the cause of my death!"
Her body and soul turned into one once more, and Fire collapsed bonelessly on the floor, broken, her heart aching, her mind burning with the image of her decomposed friend, no matter how she tried to think about something else, anything else.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" she begged.
Warm tears began to come down free from her eyes, but they were flowing away so fast that they couldn't accumulate and blur her sight as she hoped they would. She was hoping in them, hoping that if her mind kept playing her friend's dead body images in her mind behind her closed eyes, maybe, if they were still open but unseeing it would be better.
No such luck for her.
"Why Fire! Why!" kept roaring, spitting everywhere because of her jaw, what was supposed to be her best friend's undead corpse, back from the underworld to take her revenge on her, to hunt her.
"No, please…"
"It seems to me that the evidence is irrefutable," intervened the voice on the top.
Fire felt something, a shock in her, and she could help but lift her head upwards to hear the sentence, the tears still descending on a loose bridle, while she continued to feel everything the other dragoness spat at her. She suffered for it, but she could do nothing but suffer silently because that was what she deserved. Wanted to say she was sorry. She wanted to say she didn't want it to end like this, it never was her intention to hurt her, or any other.
She was just a fool, but this had cost the safety of her friend… her best friend's life.
"The punishment that this court inflicts is…"
Fire was ready for anything. After all, she deserved it for what she did, for the suffering she has brought. Everything they would do to her, she deserved a thousand times worse and so she kept looking at the higher seat, waiting for her fate to come.
Suddenly the seat began to light up as her mother's and Sonohra's did before when they got up and it revealed the previously obscured figure of a now well-defined dragon. A red male dragon, a fire dragon, with golden wings and a golden chest, with eyes of a fiery golden color as her own.
Fire froze at the sight, her heart losing a beat, her mind going numb as her father stood there as the judge of this court created to punish her for her sins, handing down upon her the final sentence.
"Life," concluded Flame as his tail, a tail that wasn't his, beat on the wooden thing confirming the sentence.
But that wasn't what Fire noticed of him.
No, what was more important was the look on her father's face as she handed the sentence.
Her father had the same look on his face she saw on her mother's multiple times during her life at the base:
Disappointment.
He didn't even know her, yet he was disappointed by what she did, what she was.
All in one, despair sucked her entirely into the void.
MDT - MDT - MDT
Fire woke up gasping for air as if she just climbed meters under the water.
The dragoness collapsed on the rocky floor, breathing hard, and coughing for what seemed like hours.
She felt so weak and her stomach was turned over and she risked throwing up at the thought of what she saw, what her dream showed her. Vivid images of her mother and friend filled her head. Ember's frosty and unloving look, her poisonous words. Sonohra's decomposing body, her voice speaking from the underworld. Her father. The figure of the red and golden dragon, in its young form, as he was at the moment of his death.
Fire closed her eyes as warm tears ran out of her eyes, out of her control. She scraped her claws into the ground. She didn't understand. She didn't understand what happened, what was going on. She was so confused and she didn't know what to do next! Her nightmare was just so disturbing and Sonohr-
She stopped at that thought, her golden spheres going wide.
"Sonohra," she whispered.
With a force she didn't know she owned, the red dragoness pulled on her wobbly paws. They were not exactly strong enough to hold her weight, but they would soon adjust to her mass exactly as her vision was adapting to the dark.
Where was Sonohra? The last time she saw her was when she was fighting Fenris. He was about to strike her down and she heard a voice, calling her name.
Fire turned and looked urgently around the place, searching every corner of the cave for a sign of white scales, vibrant electric yellow eyes, a lightning golden tipped tail, everything.
Nothing.
Not a scale, not a horn, anything.
No one.
Or rather, not the dragon she was looking for.
She paused, her mind emptied, her body unfeeling at the sight before her:
A trio of familiar dragons was in the upper right corner of the cave, not too far from where she was herself. Phantom, Kohle, and Ahmos were huddled near each other like frightened puppies, close to sharing their body heat. They were sleeping, but she could easily see that even in their dreams, they were hunted and their rest wasn't good, twisted expression on the black dragon's muzzle or a deep frown so unlike him on the ice dragon's muzzle.
They looked hopeless. Broken and defeated. That's what they had become after all of this. Three strong dragons were left broken and shattered because of her. Because of her incapability of doing something right, because of her stupidity in wanting to know more about a ghost of the past, of her foolishness in wanting to show her mother, she was strong and ready.
Turned out she wasn't.
Still, two dragons were missing. Two electric dragons she couldn't find anywhere inside the cave. For a moment she tried to reassure herself thinking that Batch and Sonohra, being the leaders they were, were out there in the forest, looking for food and water, patrolling the perimeter to keep them safe, planning their next move.
But the more time passed, the more the reality of the situation started to fall hard over her. They weren't out in the forest for they would be back as soon as possible and she had waited for a long time, the moon was high in the sky. Batch would have convinced Sonohra back already, standing guard as they slept.
And the position of the other three dragons…cuddled together, their features distorted by pain and suffering even in their sleep, salted tears visibly drying off on their muzzles.
Something happened.
Batch and Sonohra weren't coming back from the forest. If they weren't there now, they weren't coming back at all.
A voice to the back of her mind cried in the distance. "They are gone?!"
"No…" she pleaded in the dark. "Sonohra…"
A flash and Fire's mind was back in her dream, Sonohra being a zombie, a dead dragon, looking like a creature coming out from her deepest nightmare.
A nightmare that she created for herself and her friends that night in Warfang weeks, maybe months ago.
A nightmare where she couldn't make amends for her sins and couldn't protect them from a disastrous end.
A nightmare stalking her in both her dream and wake hours, showing her the results of her choices.
And now that wasn't just a nightmare anymore, it was real.
She had failed Batch and Sonohra.
She had failed all her friends.
She had failed the Guardians, the resistance, and her mother.
She had failed them all.
And now two of her friends were gone and the others would not have lasted long in those conditions in enemy territory.
All because of her.
Unable to come to terms with those thoughts running through both her mind and eyes, Fire took a few frightened steps backward.
"I'm sorry..." she whispered. "I'm so, so sorry..."
Then she turned and run into the forest, away from what she caused.
MDT - MDT - MDT
Running fast.
Faster.
She looked back. She was afraid of being followed. She felt she was being followed.
She went even faster.
Her paws began to protest burning from the inside.
Saltwater covered her eyes, her vision unfocused, her eyes burning in the air, her heart beating fast, driven both by panic and fatigue, ready to burst.
But she had no intention of stopping, she did not plan to do so any time soon. She had to flee as far away as she can from that place, from the place that reminded her of what she has just done, in the place where the other victims of her choices were.
She couldn't stand the pain, she just couldn't.
Fire continued to run through the dense forest, dodging the trees and the branches, still hitting and scratching her scales for her constant looking back. She told herself that it was necessary, to make sure that she was not being followed. But in her heart, she knew it was because she could not completely detach herself from what she was leaving behind, from the needy friends she was leaving behind.
The moonless night cleared at some point during her run, with the moon and that ghostly, milk color guiding her, illuminating her way, making it possible for her to recognize a tree from a stone, and a viable path from one that was not. The white sphere in the sky was with her, allowing her to escape. So she stepped up, knowing that someone or something, for once, was on her side, even after all she did was bring her friends to ruin without even realizing it until it was too late.
Until now.
Her mother, the Guardians, the base, and now her friends. She had lost everything because of no one else but her. It was not the Empire's fault, as it just did what it always did. It wasn't the Empress's fault or the purple dragon's, for they never even approached their base until she decided to go out for a useless quest, for a useless whim.
It was certainly not the fault of her friends that only tried to keep her safe and sane as any friend would have.
It was all on her shoulders.
Only then she recognized the tears that bathed her eyes, that made them pinch, that made her vision shaky and blurry. But with her speed, she managed to eliminate most of it, making it slide back along the line from her eye to her horns, and then release in the dark of the night, brilliant under the moonlight until the explosive contact with the ground.
It was all her fault.
She didn't know how long she had been running, but it felt like years. However, without knowing how far she has come, she continued undeterred to move as far as she could from that cave where those innocent creatures tightened in a warm hold against the frost of the situation she brought upon them. She kept getting away from them knowing she brought destruction and death. She was distancing herself from her last friends, from everything she still had, everything that was left. And she was continuing to do so, to run, her paws asking for mercy, trying to convince their owner to give in with acute pains that like metal tips coming out of the ground slip directly into the soft part under the paw.
It was like running on a field of sharp thorns, but Fire never thought of quitting because this was only the minimum of the punishment she deserved.
She deserved this. Indeed, she deserved much worse. She craved pain, she wanted it. She wanted to feel something, something that would make her feel bad for what she has done. She wanted the physical pain to match what pain was inside. And it was excruciating. Like pressure, something from the inside has started to grow, a dark creature that has always been there but that only now was stirring to exit, compressing her organs, and the very walls of her whole body, almost making her explode from the inside.
Anxiety was a bad monster, but fault was even bigger and more powerful. Together they were the end of a dragon.
But it wasn't enough to finish her and she wanted it not to end.
She wanted to go beyond her limits to obtain more physical pain; she ran on her thorns without any regard for herself; she let tears burn her eyes like poison, and not satisfied by this, she began to no longer avoid the trees and branches on her way. Rather, she took them in full, hitting them at high speed to feel the dull pain, to feel the crack of the shoulder, the pinch of the cut, and the rumble in the head.
Soon the red dragoness was nothing more than a bunch of limping emotions, from tree to tree, from branch to branch, dirty by tears and blood, driven by despair that started to make itself known as her screams and cries began rumbling in the silence of the forest.
She had nothing left, she kept thinking, she had made sure of that.
At some point, she stumbled in her run and crushed on the ground, battered, and disoriented. She no longer knew where she was. She rose trembling, her paws threatening to collapse at any moment under her, while her eyes were reddened and mostly unusable. Her ears whistled and her headache was beating hard. In her mouth, she tasted the bitter ferrous flavor of blood as she kept it open to take more air in.
Initially, she remained firm, staggering in her position, taking her breath and energy in the silence of the night and under the light of the moon, concentrating solely on her heart beating in her whistling ears. But the next moment, with one last desperate cry, Fire started again, charging with her horns down, heading straight towards a large tree without even noticing.
Her body could no longer sustain that and her paws lost their strength out of the blue during the charge, making her stumble and end up on the ground, still fast. She crawled on it for meters, leaving behind a trail of dirt and despair until she hit the tree in full with her head, putting an end to any struggle left in her.
MDT - MDT - MDT
Fire started, wide golden spheres alarmed.
She tried to get up, maybe a little too much. She felt numb, so she had to wait before she could stand. Her head hurt and her eyes burned but the red dragoness could say that she had nothing broken.
She took a few hesitant steps and took the place around.
She was still in the forest. Trees were all around her in a circular perimeter, leaving the part where she was free of trees and covered by grass and flowers. A clearing of some kind.
A sensation struck her as if someone was looking at her and her senses got on alert. It was like a sixth sense and it was telling her to go on and check what it was.
Fire did exactly as she was advised as she started to a part of the clearing perimeter where the trees seemed to be more open. She looked at the dark place warily, and raising her head toward the sky, through a chasm of leaves, she could see the night pointed by stars and the light of the moon. And standing out imperiously in the distance something familiar:
The Mountain.
An icy sensation struck the red dragoness at the sight of that mountain, the place where everything had ended, where two of her friends, including her best friend, had given a forfeit.
She felt her insides being turned upside down by a storm of dark emotions and she tried to keep them at bay.
Did she want to see the world above? Here's what she gained from it.
Did she want to fight, use her element, and not just spend her days fighting projections or companions too weak for her? She had what she wanted.
Even more than that.
As often happens, as the Guardians warned her more than once, only when we lose something do we realize what we had. Whether it's a family, like her friends, or a home, like the base where she was born and raised in.
But hadn't listened. She hadn't wanted to listen, she hadn't wanted to understand. She thought she knew better, too caught up in her arrogance.
She had everything he needed and, potentially, she could have lived her whole life that way. She had it all. She lacked nothing.
Now it was all gone, all lost, all destroyed.
And as if that was not enough, in her cowardice, she abandoned the remaining piece of her life to suffer a similar fate, convinced to put them in danger by her simply being with them, when it was her choices that put them in danger and not her simple presence.
What kind of dragoness did such a thing? One that wanted to be a Warrior of the Resistance? No, she certainly didn't deserve anything like that. Especially not now, when the whole truth about her swooped down on her.
She failed.
She has always failed.
And that made her a failure herself.
The Mountain forgotten, with a whining moan and devoid of energy as well as tears to shed, the dragoness spread completely on the lawn, lying her muzzle on the ground, abandoned, defenseless, useless. She closed her eyes, letting herself go completely to whatever pain her body had in store for her, physical or mental. She would have welcomed it willingly, she would have surrendered to any punishment the Ancestors would have inflicted on her.
So she stood there, holding her breath, waiting.
The silence of the forest surrounded her, the light of the moon broke through the treetops but avoided her, not even a trickle of night breeze moved the leaves.
Everything seemed ready for her.
But nothing happened. The pain was the same. She didn't feel worse nor she felt better. Everything inside of her was still, just like the atmosphere around her.
She sighed loudly, throwing out the air from her nose, making small pieces of leaves and dirt swirl near her nostrils. She felt a small itch in her nose but besides that nothing.
She opened her eyes, aware that no punishment would come for her from above, at least not now. But as she rose, something struck her. She looked up and through the hole in the fronds, she pointed her gaze at the obscure figure of the Mountain. It was like a dark, volcano-shaped form, standing up toward the sky.
Determination suddenly started flowing through her whole being, washing away her misery.
She stood up slowly, clutching her claws at the ground but still managing to pull herself up. She had to. She wanted to go to the mountain, where everything ended but could begin anew, and her paws would obey her no matter if they felt like stone. Either that or she would have crawled all her way up from that forest to the mountain's top.
The golden spheres were aimed at the mountain of despair, desolation, of death. But now she saw it differently with a sad but calm look, with the look of one who knew what had to be done, despite the danger, and, no matter what, she would face it, welcoming every peril willingly.
This was because a plan started taking shape in the dragoness's head, a plan that could have saved the rest of her friends at the price of a single life.
She will go there, she will hand herself over, she will say that her friends left her behind for she was a burden and that therefore she went back in a desperate attempt of getting revenge, failing. They would take her and execute her as a rebel or, perhaps, they would first torture her to try to get as much information as they could about the resistance from her until she broke.
She didn't care. She would not speak, she would not say anything and she was willing to give her life before giving the Empire whatever information they wanted from her for they couldn't break an already broken soul. And if the Ancestors did not intend to punish her for what she had done, for her stupidity, for her weakness, her arrogance, and cowardice, then she was sure that the Empire would be more than willing to do it for them.
And who knows, she thought ever more convinced as she put one paw after another, maybe she would have had one last chance to see Sonohra again before being killed too. Maybe she would get a quick look at her before being disposed of. It seemed like a rather gloomy thought, a sick thought, but at that point, she hoped she could see her best friend one last time, even if dead, even if she had to face her icy corpse, to tell her how much she was sorry, how she didn't mean for any of this to happen to her, to all of them.
A part of her hoped that one day her best friend could forgive her, somehow.
Another part hoped that she would never. She didn't deserve it.
And with these gloomy thoughts, the unsteady but determined red dragoness stepped forward deep into the forest and toward the dark mountain, fading through the trees.
MDT - MDT - MDT
The forest was strangely lit, despite the rather dense location. However, the spectral milky rays of the moon did an excellent job of penetrating the fronds of even the largest trees, revealing Fire's path to her fate.
It seemed as if the moon itself, from its raised position where it could see everything, was aware of Fire's plan and, somehow approving, was giving her its help to get to the end.
It was a rather melancholic thought to think that the moon or the Ancestors desired her death, but at that point, she was not particularly interested. No Ancestor would have stopped her even if one appeared right in front of her, and even without the moonlight guide, Fire would persist on her path, at the cost of hitting every tree she found on the way to get there. She was aware of what was right to do to atone for all that she did.
Although she could not help but feel a little, selfish, bitterness towards fate itself for how she had been treated by it during her entire life.
She lost her father before she was even born; she has been raised underground by a mother too busy with both her work as a General and the loss of her mate that she gave her almost no attention, leaving her alone. This was surely one of the many reasons that led her to being who she was and so that brought her to end all the dragons she cared about.
Fire shook her head so much absorbed into her gloomy thoughts that she didn't notice voices coming from some point ahead of her in the forest.
She stopped her inner fight not yet suppressed by her suffering. She was born a warrior, she had been trained for this all her life so much that she has developed a sixth sense for this kind of situation. She regulated her breath and held it as much as she could to be silent, then turning to her right she slowly and carefully moved on toward the sound.
The more she got closer, the more the voice became clearer. Still, from her distance, she couldn't hear what they were saying. The voices were distant, a little blurry and indefinite, mostly an overlapping that made it look more like a bunch of annoying murmurs in her ears than actual voices.
She thought about stopping, ignoring whatever it was, and keeping on her initial mission, the Mountain, and her moment of atonement. But she stepped forward in that direction, forgetting for a moment the mission, driven by an odd sense of curiosity.
She moved in the brushes with a plush step, drawing on all her teachings and experiences so as not to be heard by crushing the wrong leaf or twig. The voices became higher in volume and more distinct in her ears, separating into different voices of different beings. At the same time, however, the atmosphere of the forest around her became darker and gloomier as the moonlight seemed uninterested in illuminating this part of the forest full of small and naked trees, topping up her path and leaving Fire alone against the darkness of a forest full of brown skeletons.
But she continued undeterred, without any second thoughts, leaving the light behind and entering into the darkness.
Suddenly a scream broke the monotony of the distant voices, triggering the dragoness on the spot in a defensive position.
The voices vanished, but that scream, a scream of a child she could sense, frightening Fire as she would never admit to anyone so much that her body went rigid into a defensive position, her eyes wide open and her heart beating at an irregular rate in her chest. All her senses were ready for everything hidden in that dark forest.
Trying to take get a hold of herself, Fire took a deep trembling breath and then released it as quietly as possible. Then she got into a sneaky, lowered position, as if she were hunting, and resumed the way down the forest to where the voices, disappeared, now resumed.
But after just a few steps in the thick of the bush, she saw a sudden light in the darkness. It shone orange, nice and warm but it had the opposite effect on the skeletons of the forest that were radiated with a light that made their shadow appear somehow even more spectral. That had to be a fire, the red dragoness was sure of it, and where there was a fire there must also be someone around it. She did not yet know who or why but judging by the scream she heard and the territory in which she was, it had to be the Empire.
She smiled at the thought that perhaps she could attack these camped imperials and then be captured and taken to the mountain. Maybe luck was starting to turn her way and she might have found a way to save herself a long and limping journey, thanks to the passage the imperials could provide.
Without making any noise, Fire reached the fire and here she could finally understand the voices. They were apes, she didn't even need to see them to be sure of it. She could hear them from the grunts, the cruel laughter, and the distinct stench she started smelling as she approached the clearing where they were camped.
Fire, hidden in the bushes at the edge of the ape's camp, smiled deciding that this group of imperials was as good as any other. She would jump on them, rip some throats and leave enough of them alive so that they could-
Another scream of pain broke the forest's spectralness and the voice of what she now saw was a hatchling who was begging the apes to stop, made her stop.
She froze at the sight she didn't even consider upon entering the clearing as she was too concentrated on her suicidal plan to notice what those apes were doing in that camp. She should be surprised by what she was seeing they were apes. Still, the rawness and cruelty of what was in front of her shook her deep down more than she thought possible:
In the space between the trees, lit by orange, there were four squirming apes. One was close to the fire, breaking twigs and then throwing them into the flames as it grunted something in their language. The other three stood in front of a large wooden pole implanted in the ground vertically. Around it, the apes moved as vultures would around a dead carcass. And the carcass wasn't a wrong comparison, since the cheetah tied on the pole looked like someone ready to become one. He was dirty stained with red blood on all his fur, blood dripping from his numerous cuts and excoriations, on the muzzle mainly where he missed an eye.
It was clear to Fire that the apes were torturing a creature who'd had the misfortune of passing through the woods in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But it was only when the laughing apes moved away, that the red dragoness spying from the bushes realized the true extent of the problem.
At the foot of the wooden pole was a cheetah hatchling, crumbled on its knees and sobbing, its paws tied with hard-tight ropes. At its side another cheetah. It was smaller, dressed differently from the other two, perhaps a female but she could not tell from this distance. What she could say, though, was that the cheetah was dead, if the dull and lifeless barred eyes and the large pool of red blood in which she was bathing was a sufficient clue.
Fire gasped disgusted at the vision, bringing a paw to her mouth to avoid throwing up, turning to look away from what she was seeing. Away from the brutality of the apes, which always proved to be such soulless monsters on every occasion.
The apes grunted something and after having regained control of her stomach, Fire turned to see one of the apes approaching the pole and wielding in its paws a whip, making it pop noisily on the floor by its side, threatening in his language something not comprehensible by either the dragoness and the cheetah.
Having gotten no answer to whatever it said, the ape snapped the whip with a quick movement of the beast's paw, connecting it to the uncovered chest of the tied cheetah, already full of cuts of an angry red, a symbol of the previous lashes.
The snap was quick and loud, just as was the cry of pain that came after.
This caused nothing but more laughter from the apes and in the red dragoness, it caused only more anger to lit her eyes.
Those monsters were torturing poor creatures, tying them so they could be completely helpless, unable to do anything but scream. The apes whipped them to the bones and beat them with sticks judging by the bruises, and all this without the creatures being able to do anything.
Cowards.
Fire knew that cheetahs were proud and courageous creatures, who would fight to the death if necessary for a family member or friend or even protect their honor. But this... this was not honorable. There was nothing honorable about being tortured, and the apes were touching the bottom of the barrel, forcing a hatchling to watch as probably the father got beaten dead and helpless against beatings, one against four, killing what probably was the mother of the hatchling.
All of this for no reason for she doubted the cheetah family did something to enrage the apes. No, the apes only wanted blood and suffering for no reason if not delivering pain, nothing else.
But it was the idea of having a helpless and innocent hatchling attend to all this that disgusted her. It didn't matter the species, whether it was cheetah, dragon, or even ape. It didn't need to see this, it didn't need to witness the cruelty of the real world, and it certainly didn't need filthy and smelly barbarians to tie it up and forcefully imprint on its memory such a traumatic image as was the vision of the torture of another living being.
The hatchling kept crying, screaming, begging them to stop. Then, when they wouldn't listen, he would start shaking violently, trying to break free, or even just to do something, anything, lead surely by a feeling of helplessness everyone would feel in the same situation. But the apes kept going on, mocking it, mocking its fear and desperation, whipping the adult cheetah in front of him, hitting him repeatedly, and spitting curses from their toothless mouths.
Fire knew the feeling. She has been there before. She knew what it felt like and she felt it right now too.
But it was only when the hatchling said a word, that things changed, and the fire inside the dragoness' entire being froze. That word that she knew inside her she would soon hear, that the little one would soon call. But she did not want to believe it, so she had not given space to the thought that now, however, fell with twice the force on her whole being, on her sinking stomach, and her soul.
"Dad!" he, a boy, little cheetah boy shouted. "Please stop it, stop it!" he kept shouting, unheard, tears in his eyes and throat scraping visibly for his screams. "Leave my dad alone! Please! Please! I beg you!"
Her fears were proved right. It was a family of cheetahs caught by imperial apes. They tied them up to the stakes as they often do with prisoners, then they started beating them just for fun. Undoubtedly they started with the young one, because more defenseless, and the mother did surely something to protect him in some way. One of the apes must not have taken this well and killed her. Subsequently, the mindless beasts understood that if they killed them all in that way, there would be no fun for them, so they surely thought well to torture the father and make the son watch.
Fire's expression became one of stone. To hell with her suicide mission, she had time to get to the Mountain. She certainly did not need four useless morons to bring her there. The world would be a better place without those four and she was in a mood to do favors to the world lately.
The dragoness prepared to leap, an unfamiliar thirst for blood running in her whole being at the thought of what happened to her and her friends. She would tear these idiots to pieces as a start, and then eliminate many more for payment before she allow them to catch her and then do with her whatever they wanted.
Her golden eyes shone in the night, reflecting the color of the fire. It was as if the flames were in her own eyes; before empty now furious.
She was about to pounce when the hatchling started imploring.
"It's all my fault!" implored the weeping little one. "It's my fault, only my fault," he repeated, his eyes reddened by salt tears. "It's me you want. Take me. Please, please! I'm the one you want, let my dad go!"
The apes merely laughed at the supplication. Whether they understood it or not, it was still universally understandable that the little one wanted that torture to end. In response, they simply increased the rate of lashes.
"No, please, I'm begging you!" he begged over the barely restraint grunts of pain of his dad. The little one screamed, but apparently, his throat seemed to have reached its limit as he was now starting to lose his voice, turning it into a cracked groan. "It's all my fault…" he rasped. "All my fault."
Fire felt her paws itchy. She wanted to intervene but something was stopping her. Something strong but that she could not what it was.
"Son," suddenly arrived the adult cheetah's voice. It was weak, very weak, little more than a whisper, but somehow both the little cheetah on his knees and the hidden dragoness could understand.
"Dad?" the hatchling raised his head hopefully toward his father.
"My son, my little star," whispered lovingly the father looking at the young cheetah with all the love of the world.
At that very moment, the world stopped. It was as if time slowed down its flow.
Fire looked stunned at the surrounding environment modified by this strange power. The apes looked immobilized like statues, although at a more careful view they were still moving, only very very slowly. The fire seemed completely static too, no longer crackling. The ape next to it immortalized at the moment before throwing a stick into the flames, petrified with the piece of wood in mid-air.
Everything was still moving around here, but very slowly. Still, Fire and the two-cheetah seemed not to be affected by this type of power.
"It's not your fault, my son," said the loving voice of the adult cheetah.
"Yes, father, it's my fault!" he cried, completely insensitive to what was happening around him. "It was I who wanted to go out at night for a walk, it was I who complained about my life being boring, it was I who have my mother killed and it's always me who allowed them to whip you." His tone raised at every point, but he could not go further as he choked on his own words
"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry…" he whispered, turning away from his father, shameful.
Fire felt her heart sink to the little one's statement. She knew the feeling very well. She knew the overwhelming feeling of guilt for something you've done, something you'd like to take back, but that's not possible. It is even worse when someone's choice endangers the lives of the people they love like his father for this hatchling or her friends for her. The feeling of defeat that came along with guilt would make the weight completely unbearable, a pain swelling from the inside compressing the guts and at the same time weighting on the back bringing one down using one own weight. The combination of the two was only the beginning of the destruction that those emotions could do to anyone.
Fire could only pity the little one even more as she could relate to him. After all, the two of them were not so different.
"You are wrong," said the adult cheetah, interrupting both the sobs of the son and the thoughts of the hidden dragoness. "Nothing of this is your fault."
"How can you sa-"
"Son," the father interrupted gently but still imperious and strong, something that no one would ever expect from a being so beaten. "It is your mother and me who approved the wandering, your mother and I who followed you in the forest at night," he choked for a moment here but managed to go on. "It was your mother who reacted first when you were injured. It was not just a simple instinctive reaction, but a choice, a choice to defend you."
"But you-" the little one tried but couldn't finish.
"It was I, my son, who choose to take the anger of these apes on me so that you may have a chance"
The cheetah remained speechless, simply looking at his parent still hanging from the pole, opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water. But he was in good company for Fire was doing the same thing from her hidden position. She couldn't understand. The father talked about choices, but if the child was right, then it was he who pressed for going for a walk in the night and in imperial territory, and therefore it was he who caused all this. Just like it was her, with her little excursion to Warfang, who caused all that happened later, her friend's death included.
The father wasn't making any sense. She was quite sure that her own mother, from wherever she was at this time, would find a way to make her feel the weight of her wrongdoings, the weight of what she has done. And, this time, she would have said nothing against it. She would be right, as simple as that.
Still, the cheetah seemed of a different opinion and she had to see, she had to understand, so she kept watching.
"As you can see, my son, there are choices that people make just like your mother and I did," he smiled brightly despite the crimson that stained his mouth and his lost eye and lots of bruises. "It is our choices that lead us to certain consequences. Each choice leads to action and each action has a consequence. For this reason, as I have always tried to teach you when I let you choose for yourself, it is our own choices that define who we are, what we do, and sometimes even what happens to us," he explained. "The life is yours to decide with your choices. This is exactly what your mother and I did. We chose our destiny, our path, coming to this forest this evening, and then we decided to do everything we can for our only child, no matter what."
"B-But you're going to die, Papa!" the little one cried. "And I don't want this!"
"No one's ever really gone, sweetness, until you see it for yourself," tried to reassure his father "I'm still here, with you, right? You can't say someone's death if you're not sure of it"
"But-"
"And even if I was to lose my life here today, as a father, I would gladly give up my life to allow yours to continue, my son. It is just something parents would do for their children, little one, but that doesn't mean it is your fault."
"But I brought you out here! I have put you in danger! On my stupid whim, because I didn't want to go to bed." Hot tears came again and the little cheetah couldn't do anything to stop them. "I was so stupid, s-so selfish. I'm sorry, dad-" He then looked to the corpse of the female cheetah on the blood-soaked ground. "Mom..."
"Hey, look at me now, ok? You look at me, son," called back the child's attention to his father and he obeyed. "You did not bring us out there but it was us, me and your mother, who exploited your desire to go and do something we already wanted to do deep inside," he smiled, a little slyly, despite the situation.
The little cheetah looked at him, amazed. "Really?" he asked.
"Yes, my star. We were planning to go for a walk in the forest in the moonlight and we took the occasion that you were in the mood too," he smiled brightly at his son, his eyes shining with love. "As I said, our own choice."
The puppy remained still, saying not even a word, his mouth turned into a line as he thought about it. He didn't seem exactly convinced, but he also seemed like he understood what his father was trying to say. Probably he understood at the end as he lowered his head in silence, weighted down by the truth of his father's words.
"Dad?" he asked after a long moment in the unpassing time. "What can we do when we made bad choices?" he asked, sounding desperate for an answer. "Please, Father, tell me what to do when you do something wrong, a mistake like this. When you know that you have done something that you should not have done but that it is now too late to go back. Please Dad, how!" he pleaded, urgent.
The cheetah looked at his son dead staring into the eyes, solemn. "You must be brave, son. You must be very brave."
The little cheetah looked taken aback, confused. "Brave?"
"Yes, brave, my son. You must be strong and brave enough to admit the mistake," explained the older cheetah. "And then do everything in your power to make amends for it. You must have the courage to come to terms with what has been done, the courage to not submit to guilt and defeat, but rather daring to look to the past knowing that what has been done is wrong and act in the future to correct it with all your strength. This makes you different, this makes you brave and this is what you are supposed to do when you do wrong."
The child remained absorbed, evidently processing the words of the father, and he was not the only one. Even from behind the bushes, Fire was walking the same thread of thought as the cheetah cub.
"For very often it is not life that is right or wrong," he explained. "But it is you who make it so."
And it was these last words that hit the red dragoness like a comet dash directly on her chest. At that moment, she thought of her life. Since she was just a hatchling, she has always blamed life for all that had happened to her: having given her a single mother who did not care about her, a father who died in battle, a character too combative for her own good, a duo of old dragons too scared to do what she thought needed to be done. She has always blamed life for all this, even for her recent mistakes from escaping to Warfang and everything that came with it until the death of her friends.
"No one's ever really gone, sweetness, until you have made sure of it"
Those words rumbled in her mind repeatedly, a thought as dangerous as well as exciting, an emotion that made its way through her soul. A spark of hope in that darkness of guilt and defeat.
And it was there that Fire realized that she has done everything wrong from the very beginning of her life. She has made a mistake with her mother, giving her only more problems; she has made a mistake with the Guardians, showing herself as an immature hotheaded dragon and blocking any chance to make her a real and useful Warrior of the Resistance; and she has made a mistake when she dragged the others to Warfang for a whim.
A choice that she did wrong, but also her friends did. After all, she did not force them to follow her, they choose to join her. And they choose to join her not only because they wanted to make sure she wouldn't end up dead, but also because they wanted to see the surface for themselves too. They made a choice, as she did, as Kohle did when he decided to stay at the base.
Then, blinded by the speed to which things started to happen, they lost the ability to see these mistakes as such, and so they continued to make new ones in their whole journey as they decided to leave the safety of the Mole's base, as they decided to go in the imperial capital and got involved in the eggs stealing, as they decided, all of them, to go to the Mountain to try and save them from the clutches of the Empire.
All wrong choices. Cause and effect. A bulk that she did not have to carry alone.
A weight suddenly rose her back, her stomach, her very mind, a weight that tried to sink her into pain and despair and almost succeeded.
But no, it wouldn't not. Not now. Because Fire understood. Now Fire was brave and she would be heard, heard by the world, the Ancestors, the Empire, and all in the realm as a dragoness brave enough to do anything in her power to fix her mistakes.
She knew things would never go the way they were before. It wouldn't be all smooth on the uphill road she and her friends had ahead of them. But, with the courage to look back at the wasteland she left, and the hope for a better future where her mistakes could be atoned for, Fire now saw light where she saw nothing.
And it was precisely at that moment, at that realization, that time began to flow again to its normal flow. The fire resumed its crackling, and the apes resumed happily with their work, snapping the whip against the fur of the chained cheetah, laughing brazenly at the pain barely restrained.
Everything seemed the same as before time stopped, but it was not the case.
The little cheetah, still kneeling on the dirty ground, was no longer crying, his tears dried up a long time ago on his muzzle, and his eyes were no longer red, but bright with vitality and expressing a sense of peace that the apes probably haven't ever seen from someone subjected to their tortures and the regime of the Empire. He seemed at peace, a small smile imprinted on his young features, something the apes surely could not understand given the situation.
One of them, the one with the whip, decided to change his approach. He turned and pointed the whip at the little one, causing it to pop loudly first. The little one did not blink, continuing to look at his smiling father as if he were the only thing in that clearing, in that whole forest, in the whole realm.
The ape mumbled angrily, outraged that he wasn't seeing on the little one's features that familiar look of fear and terror it was so accustomed to. It decided to wash that little smile on the hatchling's face away and charged a whiplash.
And it was precisely at that moment that Fire leaped out of her cover. The apes did not even have a chance to blink, the whip to hit, for the campfire was already out.