A Thousand Words We Never Said

Aethon doesn't quite know when she grew so intimate with violence. Perhaps it had always been there, buzzing underneath the surface, fueled by harsh winds and bitter cold. The Royal Guard has always been formed by ravaged lives scraped from the bottom of the barrel, whatever youth yet to choke on coal dust. Where death laid thick as blood.
Silly thoughts. Aethon isn't that, not when she had been so kindly born into nobility. She never experienced the hardships that would twist brutality like a wire frame around her bones.
Perhaps earlier then, the mere act of daring to be born at all, destined to be this; veins running hot with tribes that burned too fiercely for Snowshank's tastes.
Snowshank—the island, the fragmented mess of a kingdom—is long closed off from the mainland. Whatever threats lay beyond the sea had either forgotten its presence, or given up—no longer willing to bother with their stubborn younger sibling, so deeply entrenched in fabricated tradition. Safeguarding Snowshank meant turning inward, sharpening claws and spilling blood on its own soil.
Perhaps she had simply sealed her fate when she, with four whole years of lived experience to her name, was asked by some recruiter if she'd like to be a part of the guard.
She saw what it would make her: a snarling, leashed dog, able to reach only its owner's flesh and bone.
She distinctly remembers not thinking things through before she said yes.
Those thoughts haunted her briefly, years ago, when her mind was spasming for something to hook its teeth into, the itch already long burrowed under her scales. It had been distracting her, as she tracked the darting form of a trickle of blood around her.
It wasn't too difficult to pay attention to the larger shifting of light and color, or the disturbance in the air from their movements, but RainWing camouflage had long abandoned the impossible task of being perfect, the patchwork of blended color more confusing than invisible. It worked nearly as well.
The flash of red from the bleeding scratch Aethon put on those scales was an easier target. She was biding her time, (not distracted, she would have insisted, vehement,) keeping it in her sight as she waited for the RainWing to make their approach.
The silence in a fight was familiar, a familiar blanket of tension that only grew heavier until it snapped.
She doesn't quite remember what her opponent did—her own actions a blur, formed by instinctive reaction, flowing forward without fully minding the exact texture of the situation. Then she was on the ground, fresh claw marks digging their way into her sides, the dragon weighing her down nothing more than a flickering shadow. Her own talons were too busy wrangling fangs away from her eyes.
One of these days, her focus would slip in a moment like this, and then she'd be dead. She gave the thought the designation of pleasant.
There wasn't time to dwell on that. Not on that, or how her body was already moving on its own accord, freeing one of her hind legs just enough for a vicious kick before she fully verified the improvised moves. Running off adrenaline and pure reactive thrill, it wasn't sustainable.
Merlin would be disappointed, and that thought—boring, expected, something that ran through her head at far too frequent intervals—had the slightest wheeze of a chuckle escapes her before she lurched upwards, briefly gaining the upper hand before the momentum she gathered (too much, she overshot, of course she did) sent her toppling again. The weight on her chest returned with a vengeance and she wasn't fast enough for the fangs this time. They stilled with one hovering a talon length above her left eye.
One of these days, that venom would find its mark.
Then the RainWing shoved themself off her, leaving with nothing more than a huff. They went easy on her, perhaps tired, then? Perhaps they were finally having a good day, and all the fuel in their limbs has at last drained away, however briefly.
Aethon tracked them to the same balcony as always, the one that she never bothered to tell them that it had been hers and Merlin's (though that assessment was hardly fair; the Merlin she knew wasn't anything like the stranger that moved stilted in the halls.)
She didn't share that this time, either. Instead:
"That slash along your side's going to need stitches, birdie."
They apparently didn't deign that deserving of a response.
She sighed, leaning her chin against the balcony as she glanced sideways at them. They had already slipped their armor back on, eyes shielded in the shadows of their helmet. They were looking off into the distance, perhaps to the frost and mines that had made them. A ravaged life scraped from the bottom of the barrel.
"You're distracted."
It wasn't a question, but she offered a shrug anyway. "Too busy daydreaming about your pretty eyes." They were dark brown, rich, deeper than the night sky that glinted before them.
They ignored her. Fair enough. "It's compromising your ability to fight."
"Oh, we both know that doesn't matter. We'll just keep sparring, and I'll beat you next time."
"I'll kill you, one of these days." Their eyes flickered towards her, without the slightest shift of their head. "I'll forget, or I'll overestimate you."
She hummed, because there was nothing else to add, because it was true, because it ran both ways and it was just as likely that she'd be the one tearing a chunk out of their throat one day.
They watched the blanket of stars in the skies. The horizon was already lightening, blue shifting almost cerulean in a small band atop distant mountains. The pinpricks on her side were throbbing, a tenderness under her eye that told her she was bruising there. A smattering of other surface level injuries that would have cut deeper if she was less careful.
"You know, our job was to keep the peace," She said finally, when the band started to encircle the full expanse of visible land. "To safeguard."
Not even a grunt in response.
"There's nothing outside that cares enough to fight anymore. Yet here we are. We're only left with each other to gut."
She glanced at her companion, whose eyes had returned to the sky, fixed unmoving on something elsewhere. Their mouth barely moved as they spoke. "The village I was from worshiped the moons. Two weeks ago, the crown found out."
They were again the one to break the silence that settled, though this time it split like a thawing brook finally starting to flow.
"What better peace than death?"
Their voice wavered, subtle—Aethon's heart beat out a chant of liar, liar, liar—and she wanted to laugh at the absurdity even as something clicked together in the back of her mind. All she offered in return was a shrug. "Suppose that's all we know."
"That's all there is."
They talked a bit more after that. They watched the stars blink out. She dug up a first aid kit at some point, patching up shallow cuts and testing bruises, running stitches through their side. She mentioned the birds she heard on a visit to the mainland once. The sun rose to start its low arc across the southern sky, and in the aftermath of another violent spar taken just a tad too seriously, Aethon rested.
It was the same, every time.
Already the memories blur between days, distilled on a balcony she could walk to in her sleep. With a beating heart next to her, perhaps it was peace, soaking up the desolation and loneliness of the land with a companion by her side. These quiet moments between acquiring more scratches, aches that promised next time, you won't be as lucky.
She did not consider it peace, then. In the moment, it was another hour in her day, time to pester a dragon she knew little about (dig her claws into the cracks of a facade she knew was there—) and contemplate the need to fight that was already thrumming in her veins by the time they parted.
She wonders if that's why it feels so similar without them. There is nothing to lull the buzzing into silence anymore, but it doesn't matter, because it always returned unabated anyway. Now, the court is cannibalizing itself and they're so gone that there isn't even a heart left behind to confirm its stillness, and it is still the same. She wonders. Her claws buried deep (in the viscera of what was just another dragon she once knew, why did it happen again? Why the same tragedy?) as she awaits an answer that will never come.
There is no peace for dragons like her. Only a spiteful, bloody end that will come far too soon. She welcomes it with open arms.
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Completed)
Category:Fanfictions (Canon)
Category:Genre (Short Story)
Category:Content (Mezepheles)