Part One: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/x4nure/consider_eternity/
Here I am again. Before I continue, I want to do a bit more explaining. I think that the punishment for suicide is eternal life. I’m not certain, maybe it’s just the punishment that fate decided for me. That’s not all. I fully believe in the concept of karma as well. What you put out into the universe you will receive in return. I think that’s why so many horrible things happened to me. I mean, I had lives where I did horrible things, so it makes sense. But anyway. Part two.
The second time I was born, it was into a tribe on an island close to the coast of what would someday be Norway. This was near the height of the Roman Empire. History unfolded way differently there than it did in our world, though. That world was wild, magical, untamed, and full of dragons. (Again, if you recognize it, please don’t make fun.)
Most civilizations were either at war with the dragons or had enslaved them. You could not “tame” a dragon the way you could tame an animal, because those dragons weren’t animals. They were a people with their own language, customs, holidays, gods, etc. Most people chose to believe that the dragons were animals though, because that made it easier for them to justify using them for labor as well as killing them for their skin or for food. Yes, people ate dragons. It made me…sick.
Again I was born with wings, but the regular strength of a human. My parents bound my wings tightly to my back with rope and told the tribe that I was just a hunchback. A little hunchback girl in that warrior’s society was not exempt from being trained in the ways of weaponry though, and so I became just another soldier. I was also blessed with the gift of intuition, though I knew I’d be forced to become the tribe’s soothsayer if anyone knew so I kept my mouth shut. My tribe treated dragons like people, but still fought them and kept them away from our island. I kept a few small ones safe in a hidden cave, and in return they taught me their language. I would have been banished if the tribe found out I knew the dragon tongue, and killed if they knew I had wings, so I learned to keep quiet about both.
When I was sixteen, stories about a tribe in an archipelago way up north reached us, stories about a tribe that had made peace with the dragons. They still thought the dragons were animals though, the archipelago being so isolated from the rest of the world that no one there even knew that the dragons had language. Or, the younger generations thought that. But more on that later. I’d never felt right about fighting and enslaving dragons, so I stole a boat and sailed north. I unbound my wings as soon as my island disappeared over the horizon, and during the month-long trip to the northern tribe I learned to fly. I encountered many dragons along the way, and once I explained to them that I was simply passing through they were much less hostile.
Let’s call the northern tribe the L tribe. That’ll make sense later. I arrived there in search of the one who made peace with the dragons, and I was directed to an arena-turned stable where a group of teenagers and their dragons were trying to name a “new” species. Well, new to them.
I’ll be talking about these people extensively, and initials will be far too confusing. So I guess I’ll give them modern names for the sake of their anonymity. There was Hayden the son of the chief, who’d been the first person in a thousand years in their archipelago to “tame” a dragon. I’ll call the dragon in question by his dragon name, Shi’ilka, instead of the name Hayden gave him. There was Annie, Freddie, Sean, and the twins Timothy and Rebecca. Their dragons, respectively, were Shina, Gregak, Kauk, and the one with two heads, Tay and Fay. I told Hayden my story, and he and his father decided I was welcome to join their tribe. Legally I could only join by marriage or by being exiled from a different tribe but I was as good as exiled by my home tribe so that’s what I told them.
That’s the background. And you’re really here to read about my emotional turmoil, aren’t you? Well, to no one’s surprise, I fell in love with Hayden. How could I not? God I could talk for days about his voice, about his eyes, about his little quirks and habits, and so on and so forth. My intuition told me that he and Annie were destined to be together though, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything for thirty-four years.
Anyway, three years later us seven dragon riders went outside of the archipelago and established an outpost. Just us seven lived there, but we made it a home. We’d only been there for a few weeks when my first emotional ordeal took place. See, we weren’t alone on that island.
Species and magics can be the same across many different universes, but I don’t want you to be confused when I say the word “siren.” Greek mythology portrays sirens as bird-like creatures with voices that make you see what you want most. Other tales say that sirens are beautiful women or men who live in undersea palaces, and some say that sirens are like merfolk only bigger, faster, stronger, more bloodthirsty. Sirens in that world were somewhat of a mix of these stories. They were shapeshifters, and slightly psychic. They could look into your mind and see the person you loved most in the world, then they’d take on that person’s voice and appearance. They’d gain your trust, get you to follow them, then as soon as you were close enough for their mouths to touch you, they’d rip out your throat with their teeth. The one thing they couldn’t replicate were memories and that was how they were found out the most often. They were also not opposed to having some fun with their victims before eating them, so they’d wait until their victim was sleepy, basking in the afterglow, then let their disguise fall away to reveal their true form before going in for the kill.
The siren living at the Outpost lived in a cave hidden behind a waterfall, which was probably why we hadn’t encountered it sooner. I was out looking for angelica root when I saw who I thought was Hayden waving at me from by the pool at the bottom of the waterfall.
“Look what I found!” he called out before disappearing behind the waterfall. I followed him out of pure curiosity.
“I didn’t find anything,” he said as soon as I came into the cave. “I just wanted to kiss you in secret.”
“What–” I was cut off by his lips crashing into mine. I was so dazed that I didn’t notice the pile of bones in the back of the cave, and something about his voice made me go along without question, stumbling to the bed against the wall. I was mostly undressed before he said something…off. I don’t remember what it was but it made me freeze up. I opened my eyes to see his turn red as he realized his mistake, before the teeth in his mouth turned razor sharp and he lunged forward. I jerked to the side on instinct and the siren’s teeth sank into my shoulder instead of my throat. As I fumbled for my belt on the floor, the siren’s face flickered between Hayden’s and Annie’s and its voice buzzed like a broken radio. I finally closed my fingers around the handle of the knife on my belt and yanked it free, driving it into the siren’s side. It screeched, releasing my shoulder. I rolled off the bed, grabbed my clothes, and ran. It didn’t follow me, so I stopped to get dressed before making my humiliated way back to the Outpost.
It didn’t strike me until I was halfway up the stairs to the main building that the siren had also taken on Annie’s face. I stopped in my tracks as I realized that I was in love with her, too. Something squeezed my heart. It felt like imaginary talons were tearing holes in my chest and I swallowed a sob. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. Why did I have to love both of them when neither of them would ever love me? Of course, I wasn’t aware of the concept of ethical polyamory back then, and even if I had been, homosexuality was against our laws. Two women loving each other was even more inappropriate than two men, in the eyes of our leaders. I could hear talking in the building up above and so I beat my emotions back with a stick and continued up the stairs.
“There’s a siren on the island,” I grunted as I walked in one of the doors, collapsing on a bench and clutching my still-bleeding shoulder.
“Oh my gods…S, are you okay?” Freddie gasped.
“S, what happened?” Sean asked. Annie and Freddie were already rushing over. Freddie was our healer.
“What does it look like?” I said sarcastically. “I let the bastard get too close.”
“Who did she see?” Timothy wondered out loud.
“None of your business,” I said with a hiss when Freddie gently poked at my shoulder.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, waving him off. “Just need to bandage myself up and take a nap.”
“At least let someone do the bandaging for you,” Hayden said worriedly.
I considered.
“Annie,” I finally said. She seemed like she understood what I wanted.
“Don’t the rest of you have things to do?” she said as she rummaged through the first-aid chest in the corner. When we were alone and she was cleaning the nasty bite mark, she finally spoke.
“What is it?”
“I wanted to apologize to you,” I said.
“For what?” Annie asked.
“I saw Hayden.”
She looked up.
“Listen, I know you like him. I’m not moving in, okay?” I said. “I don’t want to get between you two.”
“You won’t,” Annie said, blushing and returning to her task. “Anyway,” she changed the subject. “Did you kill it?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Wounded it pretty bad though.”
“Great.” Annie finished with her task, then stood up. “Let me grab my axe.”
“You don’t have to–”
“Nah, I’m going to. Go have your nap.”
Annie left, and before sunset came back with the promise that the siren was dead and its body burned to ashes. I felt a little better, but not much. I tried to promise myself I could be subjective about it, but I knew that my every interaction with Hayden and Annie would be tainted with affection. Would I be able to make smart moves in battle? My position had me able to make important decisions for not only our little group but for the people we protected as well. Would they always be my priority? Ii didn’t know. I only knew that from now on I’d be carrying a heavy secret, the weight of a grief that comes from losing someone you never even had in the first place, someone you don’t deserve because not only are they too good for you but because fate dictated otherwise.
I learned a lot of lessons about fate during that life. Have you ever heard of the law of three? I became far too familiar with it. See, Hayden was the third in his family to bear that name. There was one particular species of dragon who had the gift of seeing the future, and two thousand years prior, a dragon had looked into the future and seen the destruction of his entire race by a human named Hayden (not his real name, but again, shitty fanfiction). This dragon, let’s call him M, had started the first war between dragons and humans in order to find this human boy and kill him. When he found the boy, he sent a dragon assassin to put an end to him. The assassin instead was caught in a trap and terribly wounded. A human boy found him in the woods, and despite the war he did not kill him. Instead, the human rescued the dragon, I’ll call him O, and healed him. O taught the boy the dragon tongue, and in doing so discovered that the boy was the same child that O had been sent to kill. But he couldn’t kill him now. Hayden the First eventually united all the tribes of the archipelago into one kingdom by acquiring the one thing that the dragon M feared, and ruled well and justly until he died. A thousand years later, one of his descendants destroyed the kingdom by killing his son, Hayden the Second. That is a whole different story, but Hayden II’s father left a puzzle of nine items and one requirement for a descendant of his to find and unite the archipelago into one kingdom again and make a choice concerning dragons. The man had two other sons. The older son went back to the little island of the L tribe, and the other made a tribe of his own that made a living off of hunting dragons.
By the time my Hayden, Hayden III was born, the archipelago only knew his name as a symbol of failure and he was treated as such. He changed that, though. By complete accident, he came across almost every item in the list left behind by the last king. Other than Hayden and his father, there was only one other descendant of Hayden the First, I’ll call him Victor. Victor and Hayden became sworn enemies, because Victor had sworn to kill Hayden and become the king.
Long story short, Hayden and Annie got married shortly after Hayden became chief of the L tribe. Soon after, Freddie set off a chain of events that led to Victor capturing every one of us except Hayden, who’d escaped deep underneath the island of B, where an impossibly large dragon was being held captive. This dragon, the companion of Hayden II, had sworn to wipe out the human race, hence why he was held prisoner. Out of options, Hayden made a deal with this dragon, F. Hayden would free F in exchange for two things; F’s help in freeing us all and one year to prepare for the final war between humans and dragons. F took the deal.
Hayden didn’t tell any of us about that part. Annie had a baby a few months after, and on the same day, I found a baby in a basket washed up on the beach.
If a tribe decided that a baby would grow up weak or different, the law dictated that the baby should be either left in a basket on a mountainside or put out to sea in a basket. If the baby survived, it was the will of the gods. My daughter Hope and Annie’s daughter Cami grew up close as sisters. But at the next point of the story, they were still infants.
At the yearly summit of tribes, Victor’s mother the witch Elizabeth revealed to the gathered tribes that Hayden had released the dragon F and started a war. A dueling tournament was decided to choose who among us should be king (or queen). In the end, Hayden’s father defeated Victor, and Hayden defeated his father. But Sean, who was Hayden’s cousin and hated him deeply, revealed that when Hayden was born, the village soothsayer had declared him a weakling, and by law he was to be gotten rid of. Hayden’s father had broken serious tribal law by keeping his son, and so they were both exiled, and Hayden had all present turn their back on him. Some forced, but many of their own volition. Annie, Freddie, and I were the only ones to remain facing him. Freddie proclaimed his loyalty and gave Hiccup the necklace he’d been found with, as Freddie had been a found weakling as well.
There was a war. Two factions of humans and two factions of dragons. Dragon hunters vs. the dragons vs. the dragon riders and the dragons who wanted peace. In the end, through many horrible adventures and turns of events, we won the war. However, it wasn’t that easy. We won the war, but we lost the dragons. How did that happen? Well, you remember the thing that the dragon M feared the most? It was a magic gem. If broken, it would kill every dragon in existence and erase any trace that they had ever walked the earth, so that someday there would be no one left who remembered them. Here is how that happened.
The humans were resting. The dragons were watching. It was dragon custom to watch the dead all through the first night, to make sure that nothing came in the dark to steal them away. A relic from the first dragon war. The frigid air did nothing to wipe away the heat and hollowness of grief. Hayden stood at the top of a hill, staring out to sea.
“What good did we ever do, Shi’ilka?”
Shi’ilka turned his head to look at him.
“What good…Hayden, we prevented the extinction of both our kinds. That has to count for something.”
Hayden sighed.
“But all I ever seem to do is get people hurt. It’s because of my stubbornness that my father was killed. It was because of my prejudice and ignorance that you lost your tailfin. And it was only because of my efforts that so many people died today. What…what have I done?” He buried his face in his hands.
“Hayden?” I walked up the hill. “Annie sent me to check on you. How are you holding up?”
“We’ve had this conversation a thousand times but he won’t stop blaming himself for everything. Maybe you can talk some sense into him.” Shi’ilka told me in Norse.
“Ah. Not good, I take it?”
Shi’ilka shook his head.
“Hayden.” I came to stand next to him. “Remember when we lost my cousin?”
“Yeah.”
“I blamed myself. For months I thought it was my fault he’d flown to his death. Then I realized…it doesn’t matter what you tell yourself. It matters what other people tell you. Because there’s a lot of them saying the same thing, and it’s only one you saying anything different. I know you can’t stop from hurting yet. But maybe you can come down? Let your people see you. You’re more than a chief now. You’re a king. They expect you to be a strong one. Can you do that? For them?”
Hayden turned and hugged me.
“Thanks, S. You’re a great friend, you know that?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.”
The V Dragon crept through the grass, hunting, hunting…aha! There he was, the thief who had taken his tooth. Dragon companion or not, the human would pay. Wait. Was that…the gem? The V dragon would take it. Restore it to its rightful place among dragons.
“I’m going to get yoooouuu…”
The V Dragon pounced.
Hayden and I yelped, and Shi’ilka growled.
Shi’ilka and I could only watch as Hayden and the V Dragon grappled on the ground. Purple scales, enhanced eye plates, and scarlet eyes, with a long curling tail, the dragon may have been the size of a human child but it was strong, and more than a match for Hayden.
“Give it to me!” the dragon screeched.
“It won’t come out!” Hayden yelled, referring to the tooth embedded in his left arm.
“Not the tooth…the gem! …Filthy human!”
The dragon had Hayden pinned, and he was staring into its furious red eyes.
“Okay, okay!”
Shi’ilka and I gasped. What was he thinking?!
Hayden grappled the gem out of his pocket and held it up.
“See? Is this what you want?”
“Give. It. To. Me.”
“No.”
The dragon’s eyes narrowed, but before it could say or do anything, Hayden had tossed the gem.
“S, catch!”
Caught off guard, I fumbled for the gem. It glanced off my wrist and flew towards Shi’ilka who batted at it with his paw, trying not to hit it too hard but keep it in the air.
It flew straight up.
Hayden and the V Dragon lunged for it at the same moment.
It clattered through the dragon’s claws.
It slipped through Hayden’s fingers.
It hit a sharp rock on the ground.
The gem broke in two.
All four of us were blasted back by the shock wave that emanated from the breaking point. We lay on the ground, helpless to the roaring cloud of something that rose from the gem. Gray, swirling…a voice rose from the vortex.
“YOU WHO HAVE BROKEN THE GEM HAVE RID THIS WORLD OF THE DRAGONS. AS SUCH, THEY WILL BE FORGOTTEN, AND YOU WILL LIVE WITH THE SHAME FOREVERMORE.”
The cloud dissipated. We lay there for a second, clutching at our ears, wondering what would happen next.
Then the screaming began.
Dragons.
All in agony, all writhing and screeching. All over the world, the dragons died. Those who were bonded with humans were horrified that their humans would have to feel the pain as well. Those who were not cursed at the humans. Back on the hill, Hayden too was writhing and screaming. He had been the last one to touch the gem, and so he was counted as the one who had broken it. All of the pain of the dragons who were dying wracked his body, and because he was bonded to a dragon he felt the dragon’s pain and heard the dragon’s thoughts.
No. No! I cannot leave! My mate! My hatchlings! Hayden! I cannot lose Hayden!…
The world quieted as the race of dragons fell to the great scythe of death. Hayden lay panting on the ground, eyes clenched shut and still in shock, unable to believe what had just happened. I was shaking him, calling his name, trying to bring him back.
“Hayden! Hayden please answer me! Are you okay?”
He opened his eyes to see me kneeling over him, tears streaming down my face as I wept. Then he saw Shi’ilka.
“NO!”
He scrambled to his knees and scrabbled over to the dragon’s body.
“No, no no, please, no…” But even as Hayden begged his brother to wake up, he knew it was pointless. Shi’ilka was dead. And a part of Hayden’s soul had died with him. Their souls had been enmeshed, inseparable, and now Shi’ilka was gone. I watched, crying silently. I too, could feel the loss of my scaled sibling.
“You were strong. You were brave. You were beautiful.” Hayden paused to take a deep breath. “You fought bravely, and we will always remember you. May you be welcome in the halls of the gods, and find peace in the end. May Valhalla welcome…welcome you with…”
Hayden couldn’t continue, so he drew his bow and loosed its fiery arrow. Behind him a hundred tribes followed suit, raining down shafts of glory and death upon the hundreds of boats gathered in the harbor while they sang the song of the dead.
Hayden stared out to sea while he thought. They had won the war. But he had lost. Lost a cousin. Lost a friend. Lost a father. Lost a brother.
The boats were organized by family. Hayden saw Rebecca, hunched over on the ground in grief. She had cut off her braids. Hayden mentally listed off the dead in his mind. All dead. So many dead. Hayden saw his family’s boat, with seven dragons. And…three of them were hatchlings.
Hayden finally collapsed, curling on the ground, not even caring about the image of a king anymore. Annie, Cami, Hope, even Hayden’s mother started backing away from him.
“Wh–why are you leaving me?!”
Whispers started to ripple through the multitude.
“It’s his fault…”
“They say he was the one to break the gem…”
“It wasn’t his fault!” I yelled. It did no good. They were angry, they were grieving, and they were choosing the easiest person to blame. The people seemed to blur into a mass of glaring, pointing, shouting.
“It’s your fault! It’s your fault! It’s your fault! It’s! Your! Fault!”
Even people that Hayden has known since childhood were glaring, angry.
“Tribes of the Archipelago!” someone shouted. “I invite you to turn your backs upon this man once more! This man who we should have cast out years ago! This man whom we should have known better than to make our king!”
They turned. Every last one of them chose to turn away.
“No, please!” Hayden begged.
“Freak!”
“Screw-up!”
“Boy who never should have been born!”
“USELESS!”
The revival of that word, that old name from his childhood broke him. He stopped. He stopped entreating, he stopped moving, he simply crumpled to his knees and waited.
One person did not understand. Cami tugged on Annie’s arm.
“Mama.” Her voice rang out and seemed to echo in the dead silence. “Mama, why are you mad at Daddy?”
Without looking at her husband, Annie scooped Cami up into her arms and spit out four little words.
“Daddy killed your dragon.”
Cami’s eyes filled with horror. She stared at Hayden, tears forming, then streaming. She cried into her mother’s shoulder, and everyone but me left Hayden. I knelt by Hayden’s side, just us now, as he stared into the ocean.
“Not just the village screw-up anymore.” He finally spoke, his voice cracked and wet. “Now I’m the archipelago screw-up.” He laughed humorlessly. “Guess I really am Useless.” Then, so low that I almost missed it, he spoke again.
“I should probably just throw myself into the sea and be done with it.”
“Not on my watch.” I grabbed his hand and held on tight. He squeezed it back but didn’t look at me.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
And so we went home. We had to fix up a tiny damaged boat because everyone else had left on all the good ships. When we got home, back to the L tribe, nobody acknowledged Hayden’s existence. It was one of the worst things our tribes could do. He had been declared dead, and everyone treated him as if he didn’t exist. He wasn’t welcome in his own home. His wife had taken over his duties as chief until his daughter would be of age. His own mother didn’t react when he broke down in tears in front of her, begging her to just look at him.
I was welcomed despite my clear loyalty to their “dead” king. My daughter came to hug me and said she was worried I got lost on the way home. The younger children who’d been left behind when we went to war had some trouble adjusting to the change of pretending Hayden didn’t exist, and would often simply stare at him as he walked through the village with me.
I built him a cottage just outside the town. I checked on him every day, because he wouldn’t have eaten if I didn’t make him. He would have frozen to death if I didn’t build him a fire every day. He wouldn’t have slept if I hadn’t built him a bed and brought him a blanket. I moved in to take care of him the day I caught him in his first suicide attempt.
“Hayden?” I knocked on the door. “I’m coming in.” I opened the door and stopped dead to see him hunched over the table, sobbing, one arm already dripping heavily onto the floor.
“What the fuck?!” I ran forwards and pulled the knife from his grip, throwing it across the room and frantically taking off my vest to rip it into emergency bandages. He didn’t say a word until I had stopped the bleeding and started to make a poultice to prevent infection.
“Why would you stop me?” He sounded broken. I stopped to look at him.
“Because you’re my best friend.” The half-truth slipped out easy, like it had for years. “You’re my best friend, I love you, and you’re not getting away from me that easily.”
“I deserve to,” he said over a sob.
“No.” I said firmly. “No, you don’t.”
I removed all the weapons from the house that day, only bringing in a knife when I was cooking. Despite that, Hayden tried to kill himself almost every week. I had finally had enough the day I walked in to see him about to jump into the spacious fireplace.
“Hayden!” I tackled him to the ground. He was crying, fighting me, and I finally got him upright and tied him to a chair.
“You have got to stop this!” I yelled, scared out of my mind at the thought of losing him. “I can’t spend every minute of every day watching you and I don’t want to have to keep you tied up while I’m gone like some fucking prisoner!”
“Then let me die!” He yelled right back. “I can’t go back to living like this! Everyone hates me again! Everyone would be happier if I really was dead!”
“Not everyone!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Why do you think I’m here? For my own entertainment? No! I’m here because I want you to be alive! You being alive makes me happy! Why else do you think I feed you, I make you take baths, I take care of everything for you even though I know you could do it on your own if you weren’t so sick?! I don’t care if you’re so sad you can’t get out of bed most days. You’re my best friend, you’re my king, and I was there when that fucking curse took out the dragons! I’m here for you whether you like it or not, Hayden, so you better get used to it.”
Hayden slumped in his chair. There was a silence broken only by the crackling of the merry flames in the fireplace.
“Look, everyone’s going to be telling a different version of what happened,” I said finally. “What if you set the record straight?”
“Huh?” Hayden looked confused. “Nobody listens to me.”
“They don’t have to.” I rummaged around in his old basket of paper and pens before placing one of each before him.
“Write it down. Every bit of it. Tell the people of the future what really happened. From the very beginning.”
“You mean from Hayden the First?”
“Yes. All of it. Consider it your true legacy, instead of what people say now. Give yourself a purpose. Give yourself something to do. Please. Instead of trying to throw yourself away like trash. You’ve never been the person they say you are.”
Hayden considered it for a long time. We sat in silence for a good hour before he finally spoke.
“Alright. I’ll do it.”
I smiled and handed him a bottle of ink.
“Thank you.”
Hayden’s writing took up all his time. He finally started taking care of himself and even started feeding a little pack of birds who ended up following him around whenever he went outside. One night he sidled up to me in the kitchen and asked what he could do to help. I smiled and handed him a knife. He chopped vegetables with me and we cooked in companionable silence.
It went on like that for a long time, two best friends keeping each other going. However, like I said earlier, this was near the height of the Roman Empire. It was moving north, taking lands and defeating kingdoms as it went. The people of the hundred tribes weren’t too bothered about it until the Roman army came to the archipelago. Hayden and I were about fifty years old then, very old for our era, but his mind was still as sharp as ever. He’d always been a tactical genius, and it was thanks to him that our tribe lasted as long as it did. I called our tribe the L tribe because it was the last tribe left unconquered by Rome. His daughter still pretended he didn’t exist, but he left battle plans at her door and she attributed them to herself. Everyone knew it was him, though.
No matter how long we lasted, we were still one very small tribe against the full might of the Roman army. I still remember the day we fell like it was yesterday. Hayden had finished penning the last words of his story as the ships showed over the horizon. He had written twelve volumes. He locked them each in waterproof boxes and threw them into the sea, trusting that fate would entrust them to the right person. Cami had commanded that the last two original dragon riders take the tribe’s children and retreat. Everyone else was to give them time to escape. That is, we were to die gloriously in battle. Hayden and I were the last two of our tribe who could fly, me with my own wings and him with his flight suit, which only really worked if he jumped off a high place. I remember in slow-motion, almost. Three arrows ripped through his flight suit and he started to fall. I screamed in terror and flew to catch him. Such was my panic that I didn’t even think to fly away, just to catch him and shield his fall with my own body. We fell from a ridiculous height. I landed on my back, crushing both my wings. One of my legs was broken, the bone sickeningly poking out through the skin, and I had at least four broken ribs, some stabbing holes in my lungs and one in my heart.
Annie ran over, her terror breaking through her rageful grief.
“Hayden!” She screamed. He was alright, just a broken ankle. I coughed, spitting out bright red blood.
“Hayden…” I rasped.
“Don’t talk, S.” He said, grabbing my hand. “We’ll stay here until you’re gone, I promise, we won’t leave you.”
Annie nodded desperately, tears running down her face as she knelt next to her husband for the first time in years.
“No, Hayden, I want to tell you something,” I said.
“Yes, of course, what is it?” He asked desperately.
“I’m in love with you,” I wheezed out. “I’ve been in love with you since I was seventeen years old.”
A stunned expression filled Hayden’s face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, starting to cry. “I never knew, I didn’t–”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I promise. I–”
“Hayden, we need to go,” Annie said. “They’re getting too close, I–shit!” An arrow thumped right past her into a wall.
“Leave!” I said. “Survive as long as you can!”
They left. They didn’t get far. The last thing I saw before I closed those eyes for good was a spear flying through the air and impaling them both while they embraced for the last time.
I often wonder what exactly went wrong that time around. It was probably my choice to never tell Hayden how I felt until it was too late. It could have been my failure to prevent the extinction of the dragons. I know, I know, it wasn’t my place, but I still felt responsible somehow. I’d shared my soul with a dragon too, I should have tried harder, I should have done…something. Anyway. Feelings of guilt aside, that was my second life. Or well, the worst parts of it. Greatly shortened for ease of reading. I think I’ll need some time before I post the next part, it’s all about the bad things that I did and I need some emotional space to process that. Karma’s a bitch, as they say, and maybe all my suffering will make more sense if you know exactly what I did to deserve it. So, signing off for now and I’ll write again soon.