--- 1 ---
The glade stretched out before him in a mixture of green shades for the grass and golden-brown for the autumnal trees. It had a lake large enough to fit a normal sized ship and deep enough that the laps of water rested just under the sixteen-year-old’s chin, with fish of all sizes often brushing against the backs of his legs and wings, tickling him. Beside that lake was sat the dragon he wanted to talk to, posture relaxed as he seemed occupied by the water instead of anything else.
He quietly trotted over and forced a smile onto his face. It was a painful kind of smile, one that was obviously fake in the fact that it felt more like a grimace than a friendly, love-struck smile he would’ve given his boyfriend a few weeks ago. It hurt even more when he thought about what he had to say.
“Andi?” he said as he came up behind the dragon. The smile was still there.
The male before him looked up at him inquisitively, a single eyebrow raised in question. He had a slim figure that glistened a light blue colour in the late afternoon sun, with wings that were translucent enough to see the silhouette of anything and everything that walked or flew by but not so much so that they stopped shimmering like the icecaps in the North, his eyes sharing that same effect as soft, miniature snowflakes constantly fell from his eyes as if a snowstorm was inside of them.
“What’s up, babe?” his boyfriend asked in a bubbly voice.
“Shh,” Caden hissed gently, glancing around him in fear and his smile dropping into a small frown. No one was around. Good.
His voice turned to a whisper after that. “Sorry. What’s wrong, though? You look more anxious than usual.”
The male sat down next to Andi, wrapping his silken, golden wings around him and attempting to keep his anxiety at bay. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“What did you want to talk about?” He felt a paw wrap around his back and push at his side to bring him closer and a surge of feeling uncomfortable swept over him quicker than before. Every time Andi showed him any display of affection, he felt uneasy, so much so that it’s led to this point in time, one Caden was hoping he’d never get to.
He moved himself out of Andi’s grip and turned to face him with sadness swelling in his heart and regret forming in his mind. “I… I don’t think I can…” Am I making the right choice…?
Andi only waited for him to continue, his iced eyes pinning him to the spot, hopefully unintentionally. They no longer looked gorgeous, nor soft or friendly. “You don’t think you can… what?” He asked in a flat tone.
Caden took a deep breath before continuing. “I don’t think I can continue being your boyfriend, Andi. I think I’ve… fallen out of love with you.”
Andi just snorted. It wasn’t light-hearted. “You can’t be serious!”
“I am,” he said. He stared down at his wrist, focusing on the strange jumble of letters that were tattooed there ever since he could remember. “I don’t love you, and I don’t want you to be in a one-sided relationship. Nor do I want to pretend anymore.”
“What do you mean anymore?” Andi snapped. Seeing him angry at him terrified him, stilled him.
“I-I just mean that I’ve been pretending for—”
“For how long?”
“About two months…?” He looked up to see Andi’s brow furrowed and posture tense with fury. It made him try to think of a better way to put it, but it may already be too late. “I wasn’t sure before, and—”
“So you’re sure now?”
“Y-yes…?”
“And why do you think you’ve fallen out of love with me? I’m the only other gay on this island!”
Caden’s anxiety spiked at the cry. “Shush, someone will hear you!”
Andi got up onto his knees and looked up him directly in his scarlet eyes. He looked enraged to the point of his cheeks glowing a radiant pink. “Do you think I care?”
“B-but you could—”
“Boys?” a silken voice sounded in a posh Talaijan accent. “What’s going on?”
Both of their attention went to the female behind them, who looked very similar to Andi in the fact that she had a shimmer running along her body and a glisten in her wings. She looked mildly concerned at the situation at hand.
Andi only glanced back at him once before it happened, and Caden was too slow to stop him and his merciless cry of impersonated terror. “Mama! Caden’s gay, and he tried to make a move on me!”
“HE WHAT?” she shrieked, pressing a paw to her mouth in horror as she stared down at Caden.
He couldn’t breathe as he looked up into her frightened gaze. His anxiety clutched his lungs, stopped them from getting enough oxygen to concentrate on the world around him, and pain joined in soon after. Heartbreak hammered itself into his mind. Confusion clouded his vision. Fear jabbed at his heart. He couldn’t see anything once the tears started; couldn’t hear anything other than his own blood roaring in his ears; couldn’t heave a breath as it felt like his ribcage was closing in on itself; couldn’t even speak as he started sobbing. I can’t defend myself, he screamed internally. My father will only back them up.
A shooting pain bloomed in his cheek and he went sprawling into the lake behind him, the water coming up quicker than he could react and cutting off whatever air he could manage to get into his system. He’d thought the lake beautiful earlier, with the sun reflecting off of it and turning it a crystal blue, but now it was deadly. Now it was out to get him.
Caden twisted in the water and raised his head above the water level, choking the liquid out of his airway. His heart was pounding against his ribs, almost enough to snap them, and his eyes were filled with not only tears, but now lake water, and it stung almost enough as the words that Andi had screamed at his mother.
Just before he could see again, he was dragged out of the lake by the collar of his golden shawl and thrown onto the grass, a weight sitting on top of him and a hoarse voice ordering to get the Messenger now or else they’ll have to suffer with the ‘sick boy’ for longer than they have to. It was a familiar voice, and realisation hit him quickly.
Caden’s sight cleared and he gazed up at his father, slightly dazed. His father – Andreas – had a foot pressed on his chest, hard enough to crack his ribs, with the rest of his weight being balanced with the other, which was on the now wet field below them. He shouldn’t be surprised to see his own parent turned against him, especially after his father having tried to ‘beat his sexuality’ out of him since he was seven, but somehow he was, and it hurt more than anything.
“Andreas, that’s enough!” a feminine voice cried out from the crowd that was forming around them as Caden laid there on the ground, unable to do anything but whimper and cry against the pressure being put onto his sixteen-year-old bones. He recognised his mother’s voice in an instant and spotted her slim, dark-toned figure race out of the front line of the audience and storm towards Andreas, scaring him into stepping back a few steps at the furious look on her face.
“Zora, you did hear what he is, didn’t you?” he asked in a snarl. His golden eyes turned hard at seeing his wife stick up for their freak of a son, and yet Caden could only feel grateful.
She just placed her paws, soft with long digits for her habit of piano playing, on her hips and gave her husband an irritated look. Her silks gave off a small whisper as they moved. “Yes, but he’s still our little boy, Andre.”
“He’s a monster! Our little boy isn’t there! He died nine years ago, when he told me he liked his own gender.”
“How could you say that about him?”
“Because it’s wrong.”
“How is it wrong, Andreas?” she asked him in a growl that made both him and Caden, who had just begun to move his terror-stiffened body from the lake-dampened floor, jump in their skin. That was the kind of growl Zora had; one that could make even the largest, toughest of dragon males scamper away from her in fear. It was like a tiger letting others know she was about to go in for the kill, or a dog before he starts barking at a stranger. It was terrifying at the same time as melodic. “How is loving someone – anyone at all – wrong?”
His mother didn’t have time to react before she was shoved away from her husband, a shrivelled old hag draped in crimson and golden silks taking her place before his father. Carlai. “Have you forgotten your place, Zora Naidu?”
“No, Messenger,” she snapped, dusting herself off. “I just don’t appreciate my son being called a freak just because he loves his own gender!”
“Back down, girl. This isn’t your fight.”
“I’m fighting for my son!”
The Messenger, who’s meant to be the calmest among them all, turned pink in her paste-white cheeks and thrust an accusing digit forward at his mother. “Then you shall join him!”
“Carlai,” Andreas piped up. He wanted to play peacekeeper, it seemed, now that his wife was involved. “That isn’t necessary.”
“It wouldn’t be if you had kept your wife in check, Andreas Naidu,” Carlai growled before removing herself from his path and sauntering over to the shaking Imperial child on the floor. The closer she got, the more the wrinkles around her ice-blue eyes appeared more vivid and the more the anger in her small, hunched figure could be felt as if it was trickling from her in rivers of fiery orange.
Zora stepped before him as he cowered into a ball, waiting for a fierce blow to the stomach or head but instead hearing his mother’s still-soft voice, even with all of the fury she felt towards her leader and husband. “Don’t you dare touch my son,” she muttered low enough for only Carlai and Caden to hear, her voice like poison as it fell upon his ears.
The Messenger just snorted. “Get the ship ready!” she said to any sailor who could hear her, for they knew what ship she was on about. “These two are leaving with their disgusting ways and acceptance.”
The last thing the teenager saw before being knocked out was his mother fighting bravely against the gripping paws of Talaij’s messenger, cursing their name and all that may follow her.
--- 2 ---
Another snap, another scream of pain. It was like a game to them, and Caden wouldn’t put it past them to think of it as such, even whilst he was writhing in agony on the floor from his wings, still not fully developed, shattering under the paws of Andi, who was snarling at him constantly to be quiet as his mother balled for them to stop inside their cell.
It’d been mere hours since the pair of them left the docks of Talaij to be sent to Sornieth and dumped there like waste, and already Caden wanted to curl up into a ball and wait for that day to come; the day where he and his mother could leave the ship behind and start a new life… somewhere.
That was what gave him hope in this time of unending suffering. A new life, a new home; a place where no one knew them, where they could be themselves without having to pretend anymore.
What was the word to describe that? Oh yes… freedom. The word felt untouched in the back of his mind as another snap sounded out in the air and another sharp pain clenched his heart into beating faster, and that’s because it was. For nine years, all he’d been was a slave, but not a slave. Someone his father could use as a punching bag one minute and an emotional needle-holder the next. Sometimes the teenager wondered whether or not his father ever actually loved him, but that wasn’t fair. He used to. Just not anymore.
The little boy he loved was dead.
“Please stop this, Andi!” his mother screamed again, sobbing into the wooden door that separated them. “He’s only a boy!”
“He deserves it,” his ex-boyfriend growled back at her, crunching the thin bone in the top of his wing under a fist of steel. He cried out again and could feel a few tears escape their threshold.
“Please stop,” he whimpered uselessly from his place on the floor of the ship. He tried to think about the stuffed animal he’d brought on board with him, his one connection to a life that wasn’t filled with pain, but all he could think of now was how much agony he was feeling in his slumping, scarring wings of shimmering gold. “Please…”
“Shut it.” Another crunch, another escaped scream followed by a soft, half-stifled sob.
“That’s enough, Andi.”
Caden turned his teary gaze from the wooden floor below them, away from counting the cracks in the wooden planks and the numerous different shades of brown in just one small radius, to see his father standing over him with a look of disgust on his whitened features. He was wearing an ominous cloak over the soft, clean clothes he usually flaunted off to everyone, almost as if he didn’t want his son’s poisoned gaze falling upon them.
“Andre, please,” Zora begged from their cell. “Please don’t hurt him anymore! You’ve done enough damage.”
He just continued to look down at him with a glint in his shattered golden gaze, but wait… Was it a glint of sympathy? Caden couldn’t bring himself to continue looking. He hates me, why would he feel sympathy…
“Andreas!”
“All right, woman,” he growled, bringing a key from his belt and shoving it into the lock of the cell door. He had a foot against Caden’s abdomen as he did it. He’s going to kick me inside.
“Don’t you dare kick him.”
The pressure against his abdomen increased as the lock clicked and the door started to squeak open. “He can barely move, and I’m not touching him.”
Zora snarled at him and, suddenly, the pressure was gone. He turned his scarlet eyes to a retreating male half a head taller than his wife, the glint in his eyes replaced by a glassy cover of fear. Even the key shook slightly in his grasp before he lowered his paw under his cloak and fixed his merciless stare upon his suffering child. “Fine, you’ve got ten seconds to move him inside.”
It only took five and he was inside the cell, having collapsed into his mother’s arm as soon as they entered the room after dealing with unimaginable amounts of pain from carrying a pair of broken wings, and the door clicked shut behind them.
As he was being cradled in Zora’s arms, his whole body shaking from pain and terror, he noticed how dark the room was through his tear-stricken stare. How the torches in here were barely alight, giving off little to no light whatsoever; how the stone slab of a bed looked almost identical to the dark wood wall behind his mother; how the one little window in here was too high to see out of, even if he stood on the bed – if you could call it that. The thought of them having to call it a bed for the next few days was more comforting than the pain sliding through his nerves and pushing tears out onto his bruised cheeks, which was reminding him that he was still alive and had survived that onslaught.
“It’s okay, baby boy,” he heard her coo against his hair, holding him against her with one paw and brushing the other through his golden mane as he cried. “It’s okay, I’ve got you.”
“Why does Dad hate me so much, Mum?” he sobbed, burying his head into the silks she’d left the island with. He already knew the answer, but he was hoping he was wrong.
He got a different response instead. “Don’t call him that.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t call him your dad, sweetie,” she murmured low in his ear as she continued to rake her orange-black paw through his matted hair. “He may be your biological father, but he was never your dad. He never loved you, and if I’d have noticed that sooner…” Her sentence cut off into a small sob of her own. “I should’ve left him when I had the chance, and now look what I’ve helped do to you.”
Hurt clenched at his heart at the sound of his mother breaking under everything that had happened. “Don’t cry, Mum,” he told her softly, “you didn’t know, and you know I don’t like seeing you cry.”
Caden felt a paw gently grip his chin and push it so that he looked directly into Zora’s glassy, shining gold eyes. Instead of being the hard eyes of his father that were void of any love or emotion for him, his mother’s held all of that love and all of the care that he wanted in his father, and more. She was even smiling down at him, despite their situation, and that, too, was filled with genuine care for her child.
“How could anyone hate you,” she whimpered as she pulled him back into her warming embrace with a kiss on his forehead. She chuckled soon after. “No matter. Where we’re going, no one will hate us.”
“Promise?” He sounded like a child, he needed to be strong, but right now, in his mother’s cuddling arms, he let his tough, often emotionless exterior fall, his true sixteen-year-old character showing through.
“I promise, baby boy. No matter how long it takes, we’ll find somewhere where we can be who we want to be, and where you can love whoever you want to.”
*
Groaning, Caden got up the next morning, his hair mussed and his paw still clutching his bear – now named Darien after waking up last night and deciding on a name for him whilst his mother slept. His fur was soft, and the cold plastic of his coal-black nose was pressed into a tear in his shawl, helping to slowly bring him round and wake him up.
He glanced down at the still body of his mother from where he was kneeling beside her with her golden strips of silk clinging to her body and her face looking more relaxed than anything he’d ever seen back in Talaij. Only one more day until we get to Sornieth, he thought happily before he placed a paw on Zora’s shoulder and shook it gently.
“Mum, it’s time to wake up,” he yawned, innocent to how cold his mother felt under his soft grip.
Nothing answered.
He groaned and shook her slightly harder. “Mum, get up.”
Still nothing... she didn’t even groan or shuffle away from him to savour a few more seconds of sleep. She was still.
“Mum?” He chuckled to himself in a nervous fashion. “Come on, this isn’t funny. Mum...?”
Zora still didn’t move. That’s when he realised that no puffs of warmth left her slightly parted mouth, and how her eyes were still underneath her eyelids.
Fear and worry raced into his blood. “MUM?” he cried, shaking her as hard as he could in the hopes that she was just playing with him.
She wasn’t, for she still didn’t move. Not even her chest was moving, and Caden noticed how she felt like ice under his touch. NO!
“MUM, GET UP! PLEASE!MUM!”
In spite of his best efforts, she continued to lie there.
“MUM, PLEASE!” the teenager begged the stiff body that, only the night before, had cradled him when he needed it most, after so long of having nothing like that from Andreas. “YOU PROMISED WE’D FIND A NEW LIFE! YOU PROMISED ME!”
A roar from outside answered his pleas and he jumped, falling from the bed with a scream and onto the hardwood floor a few inches below it, Darien following soon after and landing on top of one of his broken wings, which were sprawled out on either side of him, with a soft thud.
As soon as Caden got his bearings after falling those few inches between the hard-as-stone bed he’d slept on and had gathered his bear up into his arms, he wept; wept for the promise that wouldn’t come true; wept for the loss of the one parent who cared about him; wept with the loneliness that now seeped into every part of his soul. “Mum,” he whispered, his voice choked and muffled by Darien’s fur. “P-please don’t leave me alone, Mummy... Please. I don’t—” He tried to stifle a sob, but it came out anyway, strangled and filled with pain. “I-I don’t want to be alone. P-please don’t leave me...”
No matter how much he cried his mother’s name from where he was on the floor – sometimes calling her “Mum”, others “Mother” and even going so far as to call her “Zora” – and pleaded the heavens above to give her back to him, she just continued to lay there for the hour – or hours, he couldn’t tell – in which he sobbed. Nothing other than her silks moved, and no other voices could be heard other than those of the gulls and the dragons on deck. Not even Andreas or Andi were nearby to shout at him to stop, which was a small relief in the new predicament he was in.
Eventually, after the Deity knows how long, Caden tucked himself into the corner of the cell and cuddled Darien close to his chest for he was now the only comfort he had left on this voyage. The teenager tried to focus on his sheep-white fur, on the patch that was sewn on underneath his right eye, and how he lost the brown button that went on Darien’s left eye when he was eight after taking him outside and getting him caught in a tree, so, instead of going to look for it, he’d haphazardly sewn a spare green button in its place.
It was different from the brown one – it was more colourful, with shots of jade in front of the pistachio that stood out in the background and small specks of gold mixed in there, too. The brown one was just a solid colour, and it was circular, too, whereas the left one was square and tilted slightly to the right, almost as if it was pointing towards Darien’s ice-cold nose.
He remembered how Zora had come home from a fair once and saw the bear at the foot of the stairs with a tear in his back before looking up and seeing her son, eleven at the time, stood just above it, crying because Andreas had called it “diseased” and torn a hole in it before throwing it down the stairs and losing some of the stuffing. Caden remembered how she’d taken him into his arms and taken both him and Darien upstairs to get him fixed, finding some cotton to put in the hole as replacement for the lost stuffing and sewing it back together, even adding a patch over where the hole had just been repaired to make him look nicer, before handing Caden his bear back and telling him to be more careful with him.
After that, Andreas had never touched Darien again, and he hoped that it would be the same case for him as the teenager proceeded to settle himself in the isolated corner of the room, his mother’s husk still on the top of the bed, and go back to sleep with the slight hop that this was all just some weird dream and that, in the end, he’d wake up and be by his mother’s side, her smile bright and eyes lit up with affection for her son.
--- 3 ---
Caden’s ex was stood over him, almost like the Town Hall back in Talaij towered over every other building on the island, and he looked just as menacing, with the light shining on the back of him and the speckles of blood from the deep gashes that dribbled blood down the teenager’s arm making him give off a murderous vibe. Even his robes looked evil, with the cuffs torn from Caden attempting to escape.
Of course, it didn’t work, and he’d spent the last hour having his arm whipped, the steel of the tip sending stings of excruciating pain through his arm.
“At least you’re not sobbing,” Andi growled, kneeling down next to him in a single swift movement.
“You’re not worth the tears,” he snapped back. He couldn’t move from where he was on the floor, could barely even breathe with his abuser so close to him, but he wasn’t about to admit that, nor the fact that he was on the verge of the very action Andi sneered at.
His left arm was gripped and pressed against the floor, with his ex leaning over him so Caden got the full effect of his snarl. “You little—”
“That’s enough, Andi. Don’t waste your energy on him.”
Both of the boys looked over towards the entrance of the cell to see Andreas stood there, arms crossed and wings fluffing up with the rage of having to be anywhere near his disgrace of a child. He was still in the same midnight cloak he’d been in for the last two days, and it’d started to accumulate stains and tears in the sleeves and cuffs, as well as his hair, often brushed to a shine, now looking like a tangled mess of golden.
“Sorry, sir,” he murmured as he stood up and moved over to Andreas’s side. He was stopped.
“Go pick him up.”
He looked physically repulsed by the order. “Gross, I’m not going to touch him—!”
“Andi, do it, please. We’ve arrived and we need to get him off this ship before he infects anything else.”
“Yes sir.”
At the command from someone of higher power than himself, his ex moved begrudgingly over to him and dragged him up by his injured arm, causing him to cry out in pain before being shoved forward and out of the now-empty doorway, staggering past his father in the process. He looked revolted to be anywhere close to him.
“Move it, boy,” he hissed. He sounded almost like a snake you’d find in Talaij that thrived in the autumn and was near non-existent in the spring. “Your new family is here to pick you up.”
“N-new family?” Caden asked with a crack in his voice.
Andi came up behind him and shoved him forward with a snicker. “You could call them that.”
Tears sprang to his scarlet-coloured eyes. They’re selling me off. “No, please—”
“You might want to start moving, boy.” His father was slowly but surely losing his patience.
“Please don’t do this—”
“Get. Moving.”
“Dad—”
“I’M NOT YOUR FATHER, YOU DISGUSTING DISGRACE!” Andreas screamed at him. It made the tears already swimming in his eyes fall. “GET MOVING BEFORE YOU BECOME TOO BROKEN TO BE WORTH ANYTHING TO THEM!”
As much as Caden didn’t want to, he knew he had to, so instead of back-chatting and screaming profanities, he just walked, though not in complete silence. He mumbled to himself along the way, telling his terrified self that he’ll be okay and that these new dragons won’t hurt him, but even so, he didn’t believe the words that rolled off his tongue with no effort at all.
They passed cells upon cells of slaves as they trudged towards the deck, all of them moaning for food and crying at being taken against their will. One or two of them even tried to grab at him through the bars on the door. They were merely slapped away.
As he got shoved up the stairs towards the deck of the ship, he wondered what they’d looked like. Is one of them a veteran, a lord, or some rich landowner? Is the other the same, or different? Are they kind? Are they venomous? Are they snobby or giving? Do they have other slaves? Are they buying him to give him a life?
He snorted at the last one. Buying me to give me a life? Caden snarled at himself. What kind of fantasy world am I living in where dragons actually do that?
The three of them got to the deck sooner than he liked and the sunlight immediately blinded him after three days of being consoled in the darkness of a cell at the bottom of the ship. Sails made of large, crisp white sheets were being tied by an average of four sailors to each sail, and the three masts standing tall and proud in the centre of the deck were reaching towards the clouds above, the centre mast even scratching through their cotton-like features and revealing a clear sky of lapis-blue above, which brought a heavy weight down on the Imperial’s shoulders.
Will I ever be able to get up there again to see the sky?
He hadn’t realised he’d been gazing up at the eternal world above until he felt someone shove him just between his shoulder blades and send him sprawling into the railing of the deck. “Move it, they’re done there waiting.”
Caden sneaked a quick glance over at the pair of dragons waiting for him and immediately felt afraid. The male was a midnight blue with runes the same colour as the lake back in Talaij, and he looked about half a head taller than himself with an entrancing kind of blue for eyes. They looked deep, like an ocean with no bottom, and they were glazed with some kind of emotion that he wasn’t letting the rest of his face show.
The female, on the other hand, was hooded, her face invisible to the outside world. She had a lilac tone with swirls of white drifting along her body, but the rest of the details were unknown as candles and tarot cards floated menacingly around her wings and in front of her face. A witch, maybe?
“Move it!” Andi yelled, pointing a digit towards the access plank that was dropped onto the pier below.
Caden did as he was told, though instead of being left alone, he was kicked at the last second and topped to the ground in a heap of gold and brown. He could hear snickering behind him before a tinkle of treasure sounded out and silenced them. Words were exchanged, but he didn’t know the language of this land, so he could only guess that the male that was talking was thanking them before the tinkling drifted from paw to paw and the board behind his kneeling body was raised.
“Are you okay?” a soft voice asked him from in front of him.
He didn’t answer.
“Caden is it?” it asked again and he looked up to see the female looking down upon him with sad, ice-coloured eyes. She’s definitely a witch if she knows Talaijan but hasn’t lived there was his conclusion to his small hint of inquisition.
He nodded as he began chewing his lip to stop himself from crying at the loss of everything he knew, including his stuffed bear. I wonder what they’ll do to him. Probably burn him.
“Are you okay, Caden?”
A shake of his head and the female was crouching down before him, keys in hand for his cuffs, yet he didn’t feel relieved. If anything, he swore he could feel a couple of tears escape from their threshold. “Please don’t hurt me,” he whispered, his stare shifting between the Skydancer and the keys of obsidian-black metal.
She looked taken aback, or even hurt. “Why would we hurt you?”
“B-because everyone else has, a-and—” A strangled sob shot through the air around him without him realising and he couldn’t bring himself to finish his sentence. “Please don’t hurt me... please.”
“We’re not going to hurt you,” she cooed in a gentle voice before she cupped his face in her hands and wiped away the tears as he sniffed and sniffled. “I know they did nasty things to you, but we’re not going to hurt you... okay?”
“B-but you know Talaijan. Surely they gave you orders—?”
“I know Talaijan, yes, but I don’t associate myself with that island. It’s a horrible place to be, and besides, they shut themselves off just over a hundred years ago. They don’t do outsiders.”
“So how do you—?”
“I’ll explain another time, but for now, Caden, can I unlock your cuffs?” She asked it in a soft voice, lowering her hood to reveal a gentle smile that, instead of calming him, only scared him further. “Is that okay with you?”
Another shake of his head with the thought of She has to be a witch racing through his tired, terrified mind.
“What about if Reece did it, would that be okay?”
“Who’s Reece?”
“The Imperial stood behind me.” She gestured behind her and he crouched down too, his eyes that looked hard and cold revealing a soft centre to him. Caden felt himself relax slightly at the look of him, and immediately felt confused. Why? “He looks evil, but he’s really just a sweetheart. Would you let him do it?”
It took a few seconds for the teenager to register the question as he was too busy staring into the ocean of dark blue sitting in Reece’s eyes. They were lined, but not with age – more like with memories and fun times and hope, and they definitely made him look more soft-hearted than evil down to the calming mix of cyan and greens and almost-black blues in his iris. He had to shake his head to get himself out of the dazed trance.
“You don’t want Reece to do it?” the Skydancer asked him, looking slightly concerned.
“Huh?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear my question?”
“N-no, madam.”
She just chuckled softly and gave the keys to this Reece guy before gently patting his cheek. “He’ll undo your cuffs, okay?”
“Okay...”
She wandered off after that, heading towards a cosy cottage-like building towards the end of the port as Reece sat himself down on the ground and reached behind the shaking Imperial, who suddenly gave him the overwhelming urge to curl up against the other Imperial and start using him for comfort after everything that’d just happened over the last three days. He couldn’t understand why, but the thought of it felt... welcoming, and it even stilled his tears for a very short period of time.
A click sounded behind him and he brought his paws before him, rubbing at the raw marks on his wrists thanks to the itching steel of the cuffs. The colour of them almost suited the blood that continued to dribble down his arm and stain the wood and fabric below it. Caden watched with the desperate need of distraction as it splashed against the darkened planks of wood and ran through the cracks and gaps between each one, staining the sand below it ruby red. With each new drop, the stain grew, and so did his fascination until a soft paw touched his shoulder and snapped him out of it.
His gaze shot up towards Reece and the other Imperial forced his paw back with an apologetic look on his face. Caden just gave him a quick, upset smile before staring back at the ground... or he would’ve done, if the Midnight dragon hadn’t grabbed hold of his opposite shoulder and turned him into a – what’s the word? Oh yes – a hug. It surprised him, and a surge of panic overcame him, but it lasted a mere few seconds before his emotions took over and he returned the gesture, his head pressing itself into the fabric of Reece’s shirt and tears rolling out of his scarlet eyes in, what began with, a steady river before they turned into a waterfall that was seemingly impossible to stop. The first time I cry in the last two days, he realised, is in the arms of a stranger. That says something.
They stayed there, in that very position, for the Deity knows how long, until his embracer’s voice rang out in the almost-silence of the world around them, making Caden turned his head out of pressing it against his shoulder and gazed up with blurred vision to see a light purple splodge holding a smaller white one. Is that...?
“Is this yours, Caden?” the Skydancer who’d wandered off just a few minutes ago asked calmly, handing the ball of white to him to look at. After a couple of blinks, more tears escaping in the process, he saw Darien staring back at him. Relief shoved its way in between the fear of a new place and the worry about being vulnerable around a stranger, settling there as he hugged the bear and murmured a soft “thank you” towards the dragoness.
She sighed. “No problem, my boy.”
“What’s your name?” he stammered. He hoped it wasn’t mumbled as he went back to being curled against the other dragon.
“I’m Aria.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
Aria beamed down at him from where she was stood. “Thank you! You’ve got a pretty name, too.”
Caden frowned. “I don’t think I do.”
“I think you do, and—” Reece and Aria exchanged a question before the Imperial nodded and went back to hugging the teenager, comforting him and relaxing him further. “—Reece thinks you do, too. He said it’s a lot better than dragons and dragonesses mistaking your name pronunciation for Rice instead of Reece.”
“Why would they do that?”
“It’s because Reece’s name is spelt R-H-Y-S instead of the usual spelling of R-E-E-C-E.”
He giggled at that and the urge to go back to crying vanished. “That’s a funny spelling.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
Just as he went to open his mouth to ask why his name was spelt that way, Rhys spoke, and when Caden glanced at him, he had a look of concern that creased his face slightly and made the lines surrounding his ocean-deep eyes become more vivid. He caught him staring a second later, though, and it was gone in an instant, replaced by a soft, caring smile – one that only his mother had given him over the years. It made his heart sink into the pit of his stomach.
“Rhys was wondering if you want to be carried to your new home,” Aria said, catching his attention. “He said we can get you a nice home sorted and that we can get you some nice clothes to put on and even cook you something. Would you like that?”
His fear grew slightly. “Maybe... I don’t want to be dropped, though.”
Caden’s new female companion snorted. “Oh, my dear, he won’t drop you. He wouldn’t offer to carry you if there was a chance of that.”
“So he’s not going to drop me?”
“No, Caden, he’s not.”
Rhys spoke up, his voice questioning, and Aria returned a simple answer that made him sigh softly before he rubbed his shoulder and murmured something into his ear, and it didn’t matter what words he spilled out upon them, for it did the job of vanquishing his fear completely.
“So, what do you say?”
Caden looked up at Aria with confidence as he told her his answer. Well, more like asked his answer. “Can we please go to my new home now?”
--- 4 ---
You really are useless, you know.
[PART 4 IS UNFINISHED, obviously]