002: Savior

“Dela’h Nove!, Dela’h Solvei! Talame Talame!”

Blonde afros bow before me, their dark faces and golden-scaled hides gleaming in the harsh sun of mid-day, the lush canopy overhead providing as much heat and moisture as it provides shade. I am unfamiliar with this climate. I may been conceived here, my nest made of briars my mother gathered, but I was not hatched here, I was not raised to handle the humidity of my home continent. 

“It is a good thing they don’t know how you suffer, Talame,” My sister Lyra hisses in the Luxandrian tongue, a habit she has when she wants to insult me and doesn’t want the locals to understand, using their word for “messiah” only to appease their ideas of formality and respect.  “Would they still call you their sweet savior  if they knew you had more in common with the devils in the sky?”

She grabs my chin and forces me to look up at the branches above us, to remind me of her true meaning. They call the Luxandrians the “devils of the earth, the devils of the water, and the devils in the sky,” a pretty-sounding poem in the language of the south that reminds them of all the ways the enemy can attack them. 

Our vanguard of rebels made a reality of the pretty turn of phrase by using the last line as a method of demise. After my shadow beast had devoured the souls of those within range, a special force led by Cosima’s other-worldly sight, found and executed all the remaining Luxandrian colonists in the Solar Kingdom capital of N’ohr, hanging them like strange fruit from trees, dangling by wings and tails, limp and unmoving. Even hatchlings weren’t spared.

 “We gave them a proper farewell,” Cosima had excused the actions of her brethren when I showed horror at the small bodies next to the much larger ones. “Our people’s souls were used as fuel to feed their cities. We were kind enough to release theirs into eternity to be reborn someday as the cosmic mother decides.” 

“You’re sick,” I spat and kicked when they told me that nonsense. I can’t help but think of my own children hanging from those trees. So many of the young were mixed like my own brood, a perfect blend of north and south. “This city has been here for decades. These people have lived together in harmony, they had families. Those children were innocent.” 

“Those children were blasphemy,” Cosima argued. “Had the colonizers never come and stolen our land, raped our women, and taken our youth, those innocent lives wouldn’t have had to be reborn into flawed bodies.” My zealot sister, tilted her head upward to the hanging bodies praising the universe. “Thank you, Blessed Mother, for your mercy. Now their souls are free.” 

My contribution to this horror is a heavy burden that I wear upon my shoulders as a shroud of shame. Even though I did not rush the shore fangs and claws at the ready, slaying all those in my path, I opened the path for them when I let loose the shadow of my soul--that darkness inside of me birthed from rage and pain. Without me and my terrible talents, they wouldn’t have been able to succeed in such untethered, wanton destruction of life. My sisters and their followers think they are right to cause so much pain because of the actions of a few. 

“They all bathed in bathwater heated by soulfire, little sister,” Lyra reminds me. “Whether they held the knife or turned on a light matters not. They are all to blame for our suffering. Just be glad we find you worthy of saving, My Queen, otherwise, we’d hang you like the other co-conspirators.”

How can I be their queen and also their enemy? I would ask my sisters this if I thought they’d listen. As it is, I say as little to them as possible.

The chains and collar from the boat have been covered in elegant cloth, my hair pulled back away from a freshly cleaned face. From a distance, you wouldn’t notice I'm a captive. Lyra wants to give the illusion to the people that I’m here as a willing participant eager to free her people. But from what I have seen so far, just as many of our people are dying by our hands as by the “enemy” hands, as anyone who doesn’t follow our ideals is cast aside and labeled, left to rot or killed directly, like those poor unfortunates dangling above us. 

From the outpost, I am “helped” into a land conveyance that I am certain must be of Tritus’ design until Vega excitedly points to the Old Solar language engraved along the walls. “Nobody really knows how to read it anymore,” she muses, “At least not yet,” her playful blue-green eyes twinkle as she tilts her all-too-human face to the side. She doesn’t know quite how to be a dragon most of the time. Like me, she had lived decades stuck in the wrong form. 

And because, like her, I spent so time existing without wings or talons, I can read on her face what her words are not saying. 

They have a plan to change things, and that plan involves me. 

“Where are we going,” I speak up, not caring which one of them answers. 

“To the heart of N’ohr,”  Lyra smiles back at me, pleased for once that I am interested. “Home. It is time you were properly coronated.”