Mellary felt strangely unsettled. Like she had forgotten something important and couldn't quite remember what it was. Like she was a half-step off in a danced and couldn't get back on the beat. Like the answer to an important question was on the tip of her tongue but she could find the rest of it. Like she had missed some deeper meaning.
She felt like a part of her was missing.
A crucial part of her had been ripped away, and she had no means to fill in the gaping hole it had left behind.
Mellary shook herself anxiously. There was no reason she should be getting this unsettled. She had spent fifteen years on her own, nothing but her and her thoughts as she roamed the least hospitable parts of the land. She was used to the silence. She should be able to handle two days easily.
None of her rationalizations seemed to be working. Currents of dark emotions moved through her, making the hair on her arms stand straight up. Mellary recognized the strongest of them; it was an old friend of hers, but not one that she had seen in a while.
Loneliness.
Accompanied by anger, sorrow, fear, anxiety. But the worst by far was the crushing feeling of being completely alone.
Mellary took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She would not last two days alone if she let these emotions rule her. She would murder someone long before then, most likely Arya. Separating. Stupid idea.
She focused herself, looking inward. A sheet of ice, white but riddled with deep blue cracks, stretched as far as the eye could see under a black sky that glittered with all colors of stars. Hauntingly beautiful veils of green and blue and red drifted across the sky. Mellary let the cold stillness permeate her mind. The other dark currents settled, but the aching loneliness refused to go away.
Mellary opened her eyes and dipped her paddle into the gold and scarlet water, brilliant with the sunset. She had ridden this tempest before. She could do it again.
"Are you well?" Arya asked behind her. Mellary shook herself back to reality and realized that her paddle strokes were off, causing the canoe to waver in its path.
"Yes." Mellary replied. "Just… off balance."
"Off balance?" Arya's tone invited her to continue.
Mellary chewed on her thoughts for a minute. "I haven't been alone in my head in four months. Even when we weren't within sight, I knew he was there." She shook her head. Dependent. She was becoming dependent. She would see the world burn first.
"Not being alone is a seductive idea." She murmured. Arya didn't disagree.
They paddled through the dusk, as the indistinguishable water and sky deepened from scarlet to violet ad eventually faded to black. Across the lake the tree-tops blazed with light, mirrored by the fireflies dancing above the water's surface. It made a magical and mesmerizing scene.
Mellary tore her eyes away from the shimmering lake and helped paddle the boat to the lakeside. The prow nudged the bank and she leapt out, dragging the light craft up onto the shore. They grouped up and carried the canoes away from the lake, eventually settling in a clearing some distance away from the edge of the water. The masses of trees blocked their view of the city, but if she squinted Mellary could still make out the reflection of the lights on the water.
Despite their distance from the water, they were still mobbed by blood-sucking little buzzing nuisances. Mellary growled under her breath and swatted at them, but there were thousands. Killing one did nothing, and Mellary seriously considered calling up a maelstrom to burn the lot of them before Arya chanted up a shield up to protect them from the bugs.
Mellary perched on the edge of the firelight, chatting menially with their guides. The elves were impeccably polite and amused by her endless quips. Astonishingly, she found herself relaxing. The easy company took the edge off of her loneliness, but nothing could replace Embrald's absence.
Their meal complete, Mellary leaned back against an overturned tree. She tilted her head back and stared at the stars, letting the fire-thrown shadows that drifted at the edge of her vision lull her into unconsciousness. The others were doing something similar; the only sound in the clearing was the murmur and cackle of the fire.
A single, pure voice drifted through the clearing. Mellary cracked one eyelid and surveyed the group. No one was singing, but the blood had drained from Arya's face.
The swell of magic slammed into her like a tidal wave, stealing the breath from her lungs. Mellary recognized the magic: the Dagshelgr. The growing of the forest. Her eyes met Arya's; the elf looked as terrified as she did. In an instant, Mellary understood.
Arya had miscounted the days. She hadn't planned on being anywhere near such a large concentration of elves on the night of the Dagshelgr. She braced herself. This was not going to be an easy night for anyone, Eragon, Embrald…
Uh oh.
The dragons.
Fly! Mellary shrieked. Embrald, fly!
Her call echoed through the silence. Mellary ground her teeth.
The music strengthened. Eragon leapt to his feet, eyes wide and slightly crazed. Absently Mellary tweaked the shields on her mind, filtering out the music. It was not an easy task, but she had had practice. Fortified, she dove into her own mind.
The part that was normally filled with green fire was empty and dark, but she refused to give up. She was a Rider. Not matter how great the distance between them was, a Rider and her dragon were always connected. She just had to find that connection.
After what felt like an eternity, but in reality was only a split second, she found it. A gossamer thread, barely clinging to existence, was all the remained of her rip-roaring bond with Embrald. It looked too delicate to bear the tempest of her mind, but Mellary wasn't about to stop. She forced her mind down the thread, calling out. If Embrald would just hear her and reach back…
She fell short, yanked to a stop by the bonds tethering her mind to her body. Ringing silence answered her calls. Mellary could have yelled in frustration. An idea bloomed in her mind and she seized it, forgetting the consequences.
Mellary leapt to her feet, already chanting. Her voice grew in volume until she was shouting the words into the night, fighting to hold her own against the Dagshelgr. Her final word boomed with magic that, for a single instant, silenced the song running through the clearing.
"Release!" Her mind soared free, untethered, as her body dropped to the ground. Mellary rushed down the connection, calling.
Embrald! Fly! You have to fly away!
Mellary? She heard dim confusion, and then she collided with the rolling storm clouds that surrounded Embrald's mind. Mellary hammered against his shields.
It's me! Let me in, I can shield you! She sent a spike through the shields and sensed a spark of recognition, and then his wards vanished as if they had never existed. The dragon's alien mind enveloped her. Mellary could feel his confusion, his fear of what the magic was doing to him, rousing emotions that he couldn't understand.
You have to fly! Get out of here! Mellary cried as she began to spin pearly barriers around Embrald's vast mind. It seemed impossible. Dimly, on the edges of her consciousness, she felt Embrald take to the air.
Exhaustion wrapped around her like a suffocating blanket. Her magic shuddered and the shields buckled but, since she had committed herself to the spell, kept growing. Her dragon's mind was too powerful; it was drawing too much of her magic to try and cover it all. What happened to her reserves? Mellary had deep reserves, more than enough for this type of spell…
Right. Her reserves were maintaining the slim link to her body. Her spell hadn't completely severed the ties between her mind and her body, just weakened them considerably. A thread remained, reinforced by her reserves. She couldn't touch them; if they gave, then her mind would become completely separated from her body. If that happened, no being alive would be able to reconnect the two.
Pain ripped through her; the magic was taking its toll. Blackness began to encroach on her vision.
Mellary! Let go! Embrald cried as her pain echoed through him. Mellary couldn't respond. Her attention was locked on the two edges of the barriers, coming closer and closer together. They crept towards each other agonizingly slowly. Chaos still surged through Embrald's thoughts, scrambling them. His flying was erratic, drunken.
The shields wavered, buckling, as pain ripped through Mellary's mind. Embrald had smashed his wing into a tree. Her shimmering ward failed, vanishing. The full force of the Dagshelgr smashed against both of them.
No! Mellary surged forward, her mind wrapping around his. Embrald tossed like a storm-whipped sea, then all but vanished. Mellary's vision went black, her mind blank.
Everything snapped back.
The world glowed brilliant monochromatic emerald, rushing toward her with impossible speeds. Trees swung at her out of the darkness. Mellary twisted, her long, serpentine body turning vertical to slide between two trees. She righted herself, the wind whistling over her wings. Her tail lashed the air.
Her wings? Her wings? Her tail?
She didn't have time to pause and assess this new development; the trees were coming at her faster than she could dodge.
Perhaps this was a dream, dredged up by her magic-addled mind. The tip of her right wing clipped a tree, and pain tore through the limb. Not a dream.
Mellary twisted her head up on her long neck and glimpsed stars between the leaves overhead. She raised her wings and thrust down powerfully, shooting upward. Her wing beats were clumsy, erratic, and had none of Embrald's liquid grace. She had flown with him often enough that she wasn't going to fall out of the sky, but she would never be the flyer he was.
She shot towards a gap she had spotted in the branches, a gap barely big enough to accommodate her. At the last possible second she folded her wings, stretched her neck out, and roared in defiance of gravity.
Mellary shot through the gap in a spray of broken branches and ripped leaves. She snapped her wings open, the thin membrane glowing in the silver light. Moonlight slid like a liquid along her scales and lashed with her tail. Her jaws opened, displaying gleaming ivory fangs, and roared again at the moon. The sound rolled through the night, deafening the song that was rising above the trees.
The strong wind currents ruffling the tops of the trees gripped her. Mellary twisted in the air, her wings full of the wind. The air buoyed her, cradled and held her. It pulled her towards the edge of the forest, away from the distant campsite and her prone body.
Finally she had time to think. Now that she wasn't focused solely on keeping her neck intact, she could feel Embrald lurking in the back of her, or rather his, mind. She had control of Embrald's body, that much clear. How she had done so, however, was another matter entirely. In all her research, all her studies, she had never read of anything like this.
The wonderful sensation of the wind over her wings tugged her attention away, and Mellary decided to worry about it later. She tilted her wings, banking towards the shore of the sea of trees that was nearby. Crossing over it, the sight of empty plains beneath her was comforting. She banked just inside the ward, hugging the underside of the invisible dome. Her head swung side to side, and she prepared to turn back towards the forest.
A jarringly red spark flared in the corner of her eye. Mellary paused, her smooth flight jinking. She turned in a tight, neat circle, keeping one slit green eye on the spark. Her gaze focused on it, the world narrowing as she zoomed in. Dragon vision was amazing.
Torches. Many, many, torches. There was no other explanation for the collection of pinpricks of fire strung out in a line towards Du Weldenvarden. Someone was coming.
She angled back over the trees, her wings pushing down against the air. Mellary soared higher, watching the forest spread out beneath her. The sight took her breath away. She had seen this in her dreams before, she was sure of it. But in her dreams, she hadn't felt the tide of magic licking at her talons as it surged through the forest. She was high enough that, even without her shields, she was free of the magic's urges. She left them in place anyway; in the confusion, she had ended up tapped into Embrald's reserves, and she had yet to read of a spell that could drain a dragon dry.
Mellary settled into an easy pattern, gliding through the night and into the dawn.