Thrall - Christie Golden [10]
Alexstrasza was pleased Kalecgos was here. This was the young blue her mate was so fond of, the one he said could speak sense. Which, she mused, he was already doing.
“I can speak for myself,” growled Arygos, giving Kalecgos an irritated look.
Many of the blues felt that they were being persecuted and hounded by the other flights. In Alexstrasza’s opinion, Arygos was even more elitist than most of his flight. She suspected this had to do with the young blue’s personal history—one that had entailed reliance on other flights. Not for the first time, Alexstrasza lamented the loss of Arygos’s clutch sister Kirygosa. Her mate had been killed, and she had gone missing before the war ended. The unhappy but realistic conclusion was that the young blue, pregnant with her first eggs, had fallen in battle. And because she had always dared to stand up to Arygos, and had sided with those few blues who had turned against Malygos, there was an extra layer of tragedy in that it was likely she had been slain by a member of her own flight.
“I do see that my late father’s plan had negative consequences,” Arygos continued, with obvious reluctance.
“We are still feeling those consequences,” said Afrasastrasz, who had long been a particularly outspoken supporter of Alexstrasza. “The very world is. This is something that was directly caused by the decisions of the blue dragonflight’s Aspect, whom you and others here supported. You need to do more than admit to being misguided, young Arygos. You need to make it right.”
Arygos’s eyes narrowed. “‘Make it right’? Will you make it right, Afrasastrasz? Or you, Alexstrasza? You took my father from me. You left an entire flight without its Aspect. Will you bring him back?” His voice and entire body radiated anger and affront and a sincere, deep pain.
“Arygos!” snapped Kalec. “Malygos was not mad when he chose this course of action. He could have turned from it at any point and did not.”
“I took no joy in the killing, Arygos,” Alexstrasza said. “My heart still aches with the loss. We have all lost so much—all the flights, all the Aspects. Surely now is the time for healing, to turn toward one another instead of away.”
“Yes,” came a quiet voice that nonetheless carried, ending the argument immediately. “We should turn toward each other, and soon. The Hour of Twilight is coming, and we must be ready.”
The voice was soft and lilting, and the green dragon who spoke stepped forward almost shyly. The other dragons drew back a few steps to allow her room to pass. She did not move with the strong, purposeful stride of most of her kind, but with almost dancing steps. Her eyes, which had been closed for aeons, were now wide open, rainbow hued, and she kept turning her head as if ready to behold something new each moment.
“What is this Hour of Twilight of which you speak, Ysera?” Alexstrasza asked of her sister. After millennia spent in the Emerald Dream, Ysera had awakened. Alexstrasza and many others were not sure how much of her had come back from that altered state; Ysera still seemed unanchored to this world, drifting and detached. Even her own flight, whose members, like their Aspect, dwelt nearly constantly in the Emerald Dream and were also guardians of nature, seemed unsure as to how to react to her. Ysera’s integration into the waking world was uneven, to say the least.
“Is it something you saw in the Dream?” pressed Alexstrasza.
“I saw everything in the Dream,” Ysera replied simply.
“That might be quite true, but it is unhelpful,” said Arygos, seizing upon the distraction the Aspect of the green dragonflight had provided him. “You are no longer the Dreamer, Ysera, though you are surely an Aspect. Perhaps if you saw everything in the Dream, you saw also things that do not exist.”
“Oh, that is very true,” Ysera agreed readily.
Inwardly Alexstrasza winced. Not even she quite knew what to make of Ysera the Awakened. She was sane, yes—but was clearly having a difficult time putting together the pieces of the staggering multitude of things she had witnessed in any