Broken Wings

One Choice

Anea told me her story over the next few days. I'd heard many pieces of it before, but never the whole thing put together. Understanding what she'd been through and what she'd been thinking when we met gave me some much needed context for her behavior, which was the first step down the long road of her repairing my trust. To be clear, I did not get over my anger at her attempted brainwashing and the side effects of that spell. I doubted I'd ever be able to forgive her for that, and the sting of betrayal would be slow to fade regardless. But understanding bred sympathy, and that sympathy began to cool my lingering anger.

Anyway, it all started a few years after Anea had claimed her territory in the southern reaches of the lands dragons felt safe living in. In those years, she'd ventured north a few times to find others to talk to, but she was largely content in her solitude. Then one day, she detected another dragon in her territory. A male dragon. When she found him, he showed the proper deference to her as a visitor in her hunting grounds, so she didn't feel the need to chase him off.

She was interested, and more than ready for a chance to talk to someone else again. She spared me the most of the details, so suffice to say they hit it off and things progressed in a similar way as many human couples after a successful first date. But then, after just a few days together, he left in the middle of the night and flew away. By the time Anea woke up, he was long gone. She was annoyed and a bit hurt that he hadn't bothered to say goodbye. Other than that, she was satisfied with the encounter and simply hoped he'd return some day. Then one day a few weeks later, everything changed.

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Heyshaan-Aneaserrah stared in utter shock and disbelief at the tiny round object now resting on the floor of her sleeping-cavern. An egg?! How could this have happened? Well, she knew how it had happened. The memory of the days (and nights) she'd spent with that wandering obsidian drake, Serrall, sent a ripple through her scales even a moon later, but that hardly mattered now.

An egg... They had mated, but they'd had no intention of becoming mates for life, or even for a season. He was gone, every scent of him worn or washed away weeks ago. There was no way she could find him. But he had to come back.

An egg! She needed his help. She knew, both from her mother's lessons and her own instincts, that young hatchlings needed two parents, or at least two caretakers, to make it through their first years. The demands of keeping a growing dragonet fed meant hunting almost non-stop. And the babies also needed constant protection because other predators and even some of the more territorial prey animals would make every effort to kill the little dragons before they could grow big and powerful. One dragon just couldn't do both jobs! Eventually hunger or murderous rivals would claim each and every one of the beautiful little creatures that would hatch from this and the other eggs she would surely lay in the next day or two. An egg... My egg... I'm so sorry...

The she-dragon stared at the... at her little egg transfixed and immobile while a raging typhoon of opposing ideas and emotions battled in her heart and mind. As a young dragon, she'd rarely ever experienced internal conflict over the decisions she was faced with. If what she wanted wasn't right, she did the right thing. If none of her options were more right than the others, she did what she wanted. Things would either work out or not, and that was that. But this was so much different.

She had always loved the hatchlings she knew she would have one day, even though they were nothing more than ideas drifting in and out of her imagination. Now, faced with the wonderful consequence of what had clearly been a very foolish decision, that love had spread like wildfire within her, igniting every thought she had with warm passion but threatening to incinerate her from within if she made the wrong choice. That was the problem though: she had no idea what the wrong choice might be.