Rhapsody caught his neck and drew him into another kiss, then patted his face. “Very well,” she said. “Please make my apologies again to Gwydion for my poor attempt at a toast. When we name him duke in two months’ time, I will be in better form.”
“Rest now,” Ashe said, then extinguished the candles and left the room.
Rhapsody turned on her side in the dark and allowed sleep to take her. Her dreams were filled with unsettling images, recalled from the recesses of her mind. For what seemed like forever she was back in the darkness and cold, wet fear of traveling through the belly of the Earth along the Axis Mundi, the centerline of the world, crawling along the root of Sagia, the great tree her people worshiped as sacred. In her dreams she stepped forth from the ground, emerging into the world they had come to on the other side of Time, only to find it in the grip of war and terror; before her, people were running in every direction, screaming in fear, their voices swallowed in the cacophony of destruction that was burning all around them. What war is this? she wondered, walking through the devastation that encircled her, charred bodies littering the landscape. Is this the Seren War that tore my homeland asunder after we left, or the Cymrian War that shattered this new land while we were still traveling within the Earth?
In the distance the sky lit up with fire; Rhapsody strained in her dream to see what was illuminating the clouds. She thought she could make out the image of a winged beast circling, a billowing cloud of black-orange flame that smoldered of acid raining down from its maw. It’s Anwyn, she thought hazily, tossing in her sleep. This is neither war; it is a memory of the battle that took place three years ago at the Cymrian Council, when the wyrm called forth the Fallen of history from the dead to wage war on us. She willed herself to breathe easier, reminding herself that the battle was over, that the wyrm was long dead. Ashe’s draconic grandmother lay buried in a grave outside of Ylorc, having been struck by starfire from the sky.
By Rhapsody’s hand, and the power of Daystar Clarion, the elemental sword of starfire she carried as Iliachenva’ar.
But the memory of Anwyn’s destruction did little to assuage her unconscious fears, did not drive from her mind the dreams of annihilation and death. It only permuted into the present, making her heart pound even more furiously, as images assaulted her unawake mind, pictures of herself running from a wave of caustic fire, her hands on her belly, shielding her child. In some scenes she was pushing the child before her, sometimes carrying it in her arms as a baby; sometimes it was within her still as she hid in darkness, calling to its great-grandmother, giving their location away. Each time she found a new place for them to hide, the dragon would find her; Rhapsody fled with the child, until at last she looked down to find herself alone, her arms empty.
Her dreams changed to visions of the sea roiling, of ships on fire and the coastline burning beyond the edge of the shore, of a continent, a world, at war. Great winged shapes circled above the land, strafing down suddenly on the dark human shadows that ran through the smoke, plucking them from the ground and taking them, writhing, back into the sky.
She was in a gray sweat by the time Ashe returned, muttering to herself in a low, panicked voice. He hurried to the bed and took her into his arms, gentling her down, quieting her as his dragon nature chased away the nightmares, banishing them from the ether that surrounded her. He whispered words of comfort to her in her sleep until her breathing deepened, her fever broke, and she slept dreamlessly on his shoulder.
He lay awake for a long time, stroking her damp forehead, caressing the silk of her golden tresses, wondering what could have caused the nightmares she had once suffered from, and from which she had been free for so long, to return so virulently. Perhaps it was the kidnapping she had lived through recently at the hands of a depraved man from the old world, who had long ago made a pact with a demon to ensure immortality, then had come to find her. Even her captor’s destruction, and her return to safety, could certainly not be expected to expunge all of the horror from her mind. Perhaps that was what was plaguing her.
Eventually he drifted off into dreams of his own, dreams in which he was walking through water, traveling through the ocean, formless and without bodily limitations, communing with the element to which he was bonded, as Rhapsody was bonded to fire. It was something he had done many times in the past, wading into the sea, turning his body porous while he was within the waves, letting it cleanse his soul and his mind from care.
What neither of them knew, as they slept in the darkness of their bedchamber, their hearts beating in time, if not in unison, their breathing measured breath for breath, was that while Ashe dreamt of the past, Rhapsody was dreaming of what was to come.
Her hunger sated, the wyrm ascended the cold peaks again.
The night sky stretched out, endless with promise; stars winked at the dark horizon, but above, all across the firmament of the heavens, the aurora blazed, pulsating bands of multicolored light, dancing to the silent music of the universe.
The dragon inhaled the frosty wind. I remember this, she thought, watching the twisting light strands gleam in the darkness above her. The northern lights; how intensely they shine; how cold. She could recall standing beneath them in a woman’s body, beneath the black sky and the glistening stars, watching her breath form icy clouds in the darkness as she pondered the power of the aurora, its beauty, its distant majesty. It was a sign of the power of ether, the element that was born before the world was born, that lighted the stars, that burned beyond the Earth, out in the vast void of space. As a being with dragon’s blood in her veins, she had been able to feel a whisper of the element within herself then; now, in dragon form, it pulsed within her, in tune with the vibration of the aurora.
Ether. Its cold beauty was hypnotic to her. But it was also the power of ether, mixed with that of pure fire, that had trapped her forever in this form, this wretched, serpentine body.
At the remotest edge of her awareness, a fragment of a memory jangled.
A young memory, recent; not from the old time, when she was a still a woman, but in her dragon form.
She was flying, hovering on the hot wind, something grasped in her taloned claw. It struggled, like the man whose head she had bitten off had struggled in her grasp.
A pretty sight, isn’t it, m’lady? How do you like the view from up here?
An image flashed through her mind, duplicated in her skin a moment later; it was the flash of a burning weapon, the sting of a wound in her wing, as the searing heat ripped through her, tearing her flesh. The agony of it echoed in the webbing between the hollow bones in the crippled appendage; involuntarily she winced at the recollection of the pain.
Damn your soul, Anwyn!
Too late, the wyrm whispered, her voice echoing her own in her memory.
She followed the path of the memory back, looking down in her mind’s eye into her blood-drenched claw. It seemed to her that the creature struggling within her grasp was a woman, a small woman with golden hair, brandishing a weapon of flame. She tried to form the woman’s name in her mouth, but the word escaped her still.