There Be Dragons

The fire cast a warm glow about the room, circling Avis and Vel in a ring of orange, replacing the sunset that had long since fizzled to black outside.

Avis passed him a cup. Steam danced in the firelight.

“Thank you, little bird.”

She set the kettle down. “Why do you call me that?”

Her father didn’t look up, a thin smile spreading his lips as he raised the cup to meet them. 

“Because I plucked you from the nest.” Said as plainly as if they were discussing the weather. 

She’d heard the story enough times, the story of her becoming, but it was a comfort after his long absence to hear it over again. Vel’s details were murky and underscored by guilt, but it all boiled down to siege and destruction, a building crumbling into dust, and her and her father escaping with their lives. She’d exhausted the rabbit holes of thought already – whether it was fate, or chance, or the divine that had spared her – and every time she was left more lost than she’d started. She was weary of running in circles. 

So she said:

“Tell me about him.”

Vel swallowed. “Who?”

She dropped her chin knowingly. 

“Avis…”

“I want–,” she changed course, “I’m ready to know.”

Since he’d come home they’d danced around it, unsure how to bring it up. Losing a wife and a mother was one thing, but the loss of a child was its own unique pain. It was the only part of the story unaccounted for, the stain that couldn’t be rubbed out. Assumed dead it had said in the records. No time to go back and search for bodies when explosions dot the sky above you. Best to grab what you can: a bag, your newborn, and what wits you have left, and get out before the same fate befalls you.

She had never quite known what to make of him. Mothers were easy to imagine, especially without sufficient memories to draw upon. The mind gets extravagant, carried away. There were enough scraps left for Avis to piece a picture together: faded locket-sized sketches, scraps of half-scribbled spells written on imported paper, initials stitched into doilies, hairpins that were too luxurious to be commonplace, a wedding gift, perhaps. All things that painted her as someone who indulged in the fine things when they came, and refused to apologize for it. All small enough to be hastily stashed in a pocket – items Vel deemed worth saving – the day that they’d left their homeland behind. 

But a brother, a first born son? All that had been left of him was her father’s word, which, until now, he had kept to himself. And they both knew Vel’s time was running out, whether they chose to acknowledge it or not. He would have to tell her sooner or later, she figured. She’d make him.

We are not truly dead, say the ancient poets, until the very last time our name passes someone’s lips, the last time our image is conjured in the mind.

Avis reached for the hand he was waving in dismissal, closing her fingers softly around his spotted knuckles. 

“Please.”

For a moment there was only the pop of firewood and Vel’s hitched, uneven breath. He’d suffered enough – the years of life that had been stolen from him as a prisoner of war was more than enough – and yet the damp prison cells and the endless torment, whether by human hands or by magic, hadn’t extinguished his hard resolve.

At last, he dropped his shoulders.

“Come.”

Avis planted herself by his feet with her back against his armchair, just as she did as a child. She watched him carefully; his face betrayed nothing. His gaze remained fixed on the dwindling fire. He raised a wrinkled hand towards it, and it immediately roared back to life. After all he’d been through, she was relieved to know the ordeal hadn’t drained him of his capabilities.

“He was…stubborn,” he began, slowly, dusting the cobwebs of memory. “Troublesome. Restless. We could never get him to sit still.” 

Avis sat still now and closed her eyes, trying to summon a vision of him from nothing, like she had her mother. 

“What did he look like?”

“He had eyes like globes. Big brown globes. Wide, and wonderful. Since the moment he was born.” 

Her throat tightened.

“He came quietly. Unblinking, and very observant. It made the midwife uneasy. You, though,” he paused in a fit of half-cough, half-chuckle. “Kicking and screaming.”

Avis hummed, managed a smile. “Sounds right.”

Vel laid a hand on her head, waving his thumb softly through her hair. “You’ve always looked like your mother. Everybody said he took after me.”

Avis glanced around the room, the lack of mirrors and reflections throughout the place no coincidence. She’d made the effort to remove them before he returned. Each time he got up to shave, to wash, to straighten his collar, she knew who he’d see staring back.

She closed her eyes again. “What else?”

A waterfall of words tumbled out now, his tone eager. “He loved stories, the Old Tales. He wouldn’t let me leave the bedside each night until he’d heard one. I was never any good at it, not as good as the real storytellers. I was bad at voices, I forgot some details. Some nights I’d Conjure the wooden soldiers out of his toy chest and make them act it out, play characters, do the dance. I don’t know if it was more for his enjoyment, or mine.

“As he got older he began interrupting, inserting his own additions because the stories were too boring. And the things he’d drum up about the boys he played with - my word. He’d come home with scraped knees and dirty trousers and twisted ankles, talking of sea dragons and volcanoes and vengeful kings to mask what was obviously roughhousing out on the rocks. Your mother was furious, but he never let up. Swords and beasts and fairies, he said.”

Avis exhaled. If only he’d known the world that awaited him. War, magic, and death. Kingdoms divided and maps redrawn, thousands of lives the price. It was difficult to imagine his same wistfulness, when it had cost them all so much.

Vel shook his head. “It was the way he could understand the world, I suppose. Turn it all into myth and fable.”

Avis leaned against her father’s knee, uncomfortably bony, and opened her eyes to the firelight. “Don’t we all?”

He huffed. “You can’t run forever. I’ve learned my lesson. He’d have to face reality somehow. The world isn’t a game played down by the shore, out on the rocks. It’s monstrous, and cruel, and unfair. And beyond our comprehension.”

Battlefields, dungeons, famine – all he’d known.  The return of dark magic to this realm had divided more than it had unified, had taken more than it had revived. Her family, her homeland – all nothing but dust underfoot in the conflict between the Gifted and the Ordinary, those capable of magic and those deemed unworthy, forced into the shadows.

She looked up at him, silent tears tracing his cheeks. Perhaps there was a part of him buried deep within, however small, that envied her brother’s unrelenting whimsy in the face of it all.

It was a while before Avis spoke, the fire dim once again.

“Where do you think he is now?”

Vel shook his head. “Somewhere above the clouds, I hope. With the Spirits. With his mother. Running wild, with his swords and fairies and dragons.”

A pause, then he added: “It’ll be my turn soon, little bird.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But it’s true.”

“I know, but don’t say it.”

“I’m satisfied. I’ve survived long enough to see peace come to these lands, to see my child grown. That is enough.”

He gulped his tea. Conversation over. Avis folded her hands.

Vel’s gifts, his magic, had eluded her. Avis couldn’t bear to tell him now, not this close to the end. She hadn’t considered what would become of the rest of her life – one rarely does in wartime. Conflict had dominated their world for years because of people like her. Without Vel, what was left? Who ought she to be?

“You’re tired,” she said. She took the cup from him and rose to her feet. “I’ll leave you to rest.”

At the door, she heard a mumble from her father’s chair.

“What was that?”

Vel craned his neck to look back at her.

“Aden,” he smiled. “His name was Aden.”

She imagined the land above the clouds, her mother and brother observing her, observing the ruin brought to land they once knew. The old kings, the beasts, the dragons. There would always be dragons, in this realm or the next.

Her father was right. Her brother couldn’t run forever.

But she could.