So small, this little mortal.
Humans were always so small.
“You can’t see it. But I don’t understand why. Everything here,” her breath caught, but her sob was not sadness. “It’s reaching for you, calling you back. The leaves wave at you. I can hear the earth sigh to have you upon its back once more.”
“I cannot bring back this place which has lingered so long in death. Even if the ground wants me here, there is nothing to resurrect.”
“No, there is not.”
She bit her bottom lip, worried the plump flesh with her blunted teeth, came to some decision that had her nodding, drawing back with a hiss.
Her blood struck the air.
Her choice, to cut herself once more on his scales.
“Will, no? My blood to give shape to the world. To show you what lives right before you that you cannot see.” She spoke the words in his mind, the bond between them forged anew in the cutting of her hand as she slipped from his and he was too slow to stop her from stepping off the side of the mountain and reaching out to touch the sky.
He is home.
Except she didn’t fall, and the empty space beneath her feet reformed into solid rock. The blackened, fire burned, sun-dried husk of the eden he had protected for centuries before his capture, unfurled.
He had watched, when he was but a fledgling, barely hatched from his shell, a flower open to the heat of the sun overhead. He had watched it from the moment its stem sprouted from the earth until it budded, and the bud opened with a bloom of colors his child’s eyes had never seen before, reds and violets and oranges.
His mouth opened now same as it had then, watching a world that had been dark turn vibrant with color.
His home, safeguarded by a djinn’s spell.
Amece had trapped him beneath the seas, but she’d saved his heaven for him.
Her daughter had freed him and given him back the land.
Chapter Thirty-One
Havence watched his face, watched to see when the sadness left his eyes and wonder replaced it.
How could he not have seen the bounty before him? How could she not have seen it, hidden away on top of the mountain she’d climbed so many times throughout her life?
It didn’t matter though.
The not knowing or the not seeing, not now when the wonder of the trees and the grasses, and, by the Dragon, flowers, so very many flowers, and not just the desert flowers she’d sometimes been lucky enough to find in the sands, but flowers she had no names for, stretched as far as her eye could see.
She was almost afraid to step forward, to feel what grass felt like on her bare feet, but he moved first, and he did not deny her entry, and so she followed.
The blades were soft, cushioned where she stepped, tickled her sole when the lifted her foot just enough to run her toes over the needle edges of the green stalks. They didn’t prick at her as the barbs on a cactus did.
He moved off ahead of her, and she watched where he walked, the way the grass, crushed in his passing, sprang up with a shake when he moved on.
Her own footsteps left no marking in the ground, the thin stalks of green unbent where she’d entered the valley with him.
Ven bent forward. She reached for the stalks, hesitated a moment before plucking a handful from the earth, apologizing to the poor roots she pulled out in the process, and raising the bunch to her nose to smell.
Nothing, absolutely nothing had ever smelled so fresh and so invigorating as the grass she sniffed.
She rubbed it against her cheeks, tiny droplets of water clinging to the blades like fresh morning dew, sticking to her skin where she basked in scent.
To smell like crushed grass…
To smell like wind and sky and desert storm…
A hint of fire, so warm and bright, licking beneath the skin.
She opened her eyes, not having realized she’d closed them, to see Ouros disappear into a copse of trees ahead of her.
Almost, she didn’t want to follow.
For the first time in her life, she stood in the blinding light of the sun, and the heat upon her face did not burn her, the wind was cool and gentle where it caressed her skin. She breathed in, and there was no rasp to the sound, no dry cough to follow.
But if sunlight felt so good when surrounded by a sea of green shoots, what would shade be like, when not confined to the stoop of a porch or a sweltering house built onto the side of a hill?
“Ouros?”
If he heard her call, he gave no answer to it.
If she should have feared this wonderful, magical place he’d brought her to, she couldn’t.
Ven raced across the grass, laughing when long stems, white drifts of fluff upon their heads, exploded in her passing, the tiny seeds pulled in the wind she created, dancing with her as she spun and twirled and stains of green and yellow colored the hem of her skirt, a kaleidoscope she could carry with her where she ran.
Leaves.
The difference in textures was intense between the grass and the fallen petals from the trees. Some felt oily beneath her feet. Others were dry and velvet soft to the touch.
A few were brown and brittle, and her heart caught in her throat, the desert air not completely gone from this refuge, so it seemed.
The blades of grass she’d carried slipped from her fingers.
If her dragon saw such evidence of the sands here in his safe harbor, if he realized that his sanctuary was not as protected as he thought, he would blame her for the demise, and she didn’t think she would argue against the same, having given him back his hope only to strip it from him.
She dropped to her knees, rummaged through the fallen leaves, plucked at the brown ones, bundling them into her skirt, not knowing where she’d hide the remnants, just knowing she had to try.
Chapter Thirty-Two
What in the Storm’s Name was she doing?
He had wound himself through the trees as he walked through the woods, his scales scraping at the bark, old and new, that he passed. Some of the great monarchs of the forest stretched nearly to the heavens, grown so large since his time imprisoned.
The last time he’d walked these paths, the trees had still been young saplings, and he the largest thing that grew in the copses.
Now he walked among brothers, the thick trunks sturdy and strong, grown tall enough to wave at him as he flew by overhead, when and if he chose to leave this place and take to the skies.
While the world beyond this wonderland knew only desert heat and sand filled winds, here still turned the seasons.
The oaks and the maples spoke to him, whispered how the cold seasons would come soon, that they were glad he had come before they shed their coats to the winter.
Would he be there when they woke in the summer?
Branches scratched against his nose and snout, and he snorted in answer, not knowing the truth either way.
A few of the great green behemoths sighed, swayed against each other.
He knew them, knew that high on their trunks, where the leaves grew thickest and the branches most dense, his scales had left engravings in the heavy chestnuts, claiming the boughs as his own.
Friends with the land. One with it. A creature of fire and earth.
He had missed talking to the trees.
Snows, how he had missed the trees, their quiet humming when the wind passed over their bark. Flowers were beautiful in their precious hues, but trees were strong and majestic, and he had missed the serenity of standing beneath their branches, sheltered by their shade.
But she did not seem to enjoy the same, frantic, almost, as she worked at stealing leaves in her clothing, gathering up only the brown ones, perhaps the color appealing to her more than most?
He snaked his head between two elms, his shadow a different type of shade than the filtered light the leaves provided on the forest floor.
She looked up at him, flinched back, fell onto the ground in a tumble of browns and red and a few greens and yellows swirling a
round her with her movements.
He chuckled, his hissing laugh releasing twin streams of steam from his nostrils that swirled in the diffused light from the canopy overhead.
“I’m sorry!”
“You’re sorry?”
Of all the things she could have said, an apology had not crossed his mind.
For the first time in centuries, since she had freed him from the seas, he finally felt relief.
She had said this place was gone, and his hope had died with her words. Simple misunderstanding the cause, her magic too untested to have known any different, but she had given this world back to him.
Here he could begin anew. He could be safe. He could rest without the constant battering of waves against his side, the threat of kraken and shark testing his defenses.
What had she to be sorry for?
“If you can bring back the rains, the leaves will regrow like they did near the house. There is still so much green here! The desert hasn’t claimed this place yet. Perhaps the dead leaves will come back to life since you are returned.”
Her fingers clutched at the brown and brittle piles she’s been gathering to her lap.
A woman with no sense of the seasons, who knew only the heat.
“Winter is coming. It is mid-fall, the autumn months.”
Her eyes drew near together, but she nodded, trying to parcel out his words. “When the heat dies back a little, and the cold relieves the ache of the sun for a time.”
How much had her people lost in chaining him beneath the waters? So much that they did not know the natural order of the world? The way it turned and changed? Its cycle of death and rebirth? She was a healer, a master of potions. Surely, she knew how a plant’s life worked?
“You have no seasons, in the sands where you live?”
“We have heat and more or less heat. That is all.”
He crouched low, huffed out a breath that blew against the leaves around her, swirled them in a cyclone that played at her hair and cheeks, skimmed over her flesh in a soft caress. “Heat for the summer, and rains in the spring. Winter comes, and the snows fall, and before the first covering of white, the trees lose their leaves to regrow their coats come the rewarming of the earth. The leaves are meant to fall, Havence. They grow dry and brittle and will become the earth after a time, their nutrients shed to feed the roots they fell from. This is not the desert’s doing, little witch. Perhaps I was not the only one to lose much in my time captured beneath the waves.”
Ouros slunk back, stared at her where her chest rose and fell in rapid breaths, her heartbeat fluttering in the pulse at her throat.
She’d been terrified. But not of him.
For him.
Ouros frowned.
He shook his head. “Come, djinn, let me show you the wonders of this world you do not know.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
She followed him through the forest, and while she was not easy with his words, that he showed no fear and no sorrow at the brown leaves that fluttered from the trees in their passing did much to relieve the despair in her heart.
What if releasing the spell that had hidden this place stole the life from it?
How had it remained this full of life for years unending when the rest of her world turned to dust?
And if she had not known of the magic that hid his oasis, then who had cast the spell that safeguarded it from time? Why do so, if Amece was bent on locking him away from the world of man? Why save what he loved if he was not meant to return?
A question for another time.
Her mind losing the train of thought entirely as she followed his teal hide through a gap in the trees and walked into an oasis the likes of which she’d never imagined.
Rolling seas of green grass leading to the line of trees at the start of the forest, that had been awesome.
A sense of life sprouting up around her when she’d first stepped into this world of his.
But now…
Her breath caught in her throat.
If the flowers at the edge of the field had been colorful, she had no way to describe what she came upon here. Petals of every shape and size, of every imaginable shade from the rainbow, stretched across the ground in wild disarray. Not bushes, these were thin stalked stems, some thicker. Blossoms that opened with shoots of yellow and orange at their centers, some so strange as to even appear blue.
But more amazing than that was the life that moved around them. Creatures that flew from flower to flower, basking in the puffs of pollen that flew into the air when the insects landed and rolled against the stamens.
She raised her hands to her ears, tried to block out the roar of the water tumbling into a pool at the farthest end of the glade.
The falls’ call was louder even than Ouros’ battle cry before the soldiers in the desert.
The noise didn’t seem to bother the deer sipping from the basin.
Merciful Dragons, she’d never seen a deer in real life before, only pictures passed down from her mother, images described in stories from her father. Four-legged creatures, gentle in nature, shy and timid though their antlers would suggest otherwise.
A buck.
Only the males had antlers, like the one standing on the black boulder which dominated the center of the glen, watching over his domain, a foreleg raised and pawing at the stone as he stared at Ouros and Ven watched dragon face down stag, and deer bolt away. The doe and its fawn followed the male, skipping into the forest, the brown of their pelts blending with the bark of the trees, only a hint of white in the fur of their tails giving them away before even that too was lost to the woods.
A bird trilled from somewhere out of sight. Two more chased each other across the sky, uncaring that another creature of the air stood beneath them, willing to share their claim with the dragon if he demanded.
Her world was of sand, dead plants and dried husks.
Ven raised her hands to her mouth and wept at all she’d thought lost, never to see, made real.
She gathered fallen pieces of wood; the logs she could drag herself were still green, bad for burning, water-logged as they were, but that seemed to be the same with everything here. Nothing was dry or ashing. Everything was filled with vibrancy.
Ouros said the state of the branches wouldn’t matter, he could light a fire from anything.
They’d spent the day in the glade, his large body perched on his rock, sun-bathing, he said when she asked, while she roamed from plant to plant, petting the velvet and the silk of the leaves, cupping buds between her palms to bring them to her nose and smell the riot of fragrances each one held.
The lilies made her sneeze, the orange pollen coating her fingers and nose, too close to the plant.
Her dragon laughed at her, at her mustache of brownish-red.
“The pool is fresh. Drink and wash from its waters. They replenish every day.”
The water from the falls overhead never slowed and the lake never overflowed its bounds. She knelt at its far edge, away from the sand bank that led into its depths, a small drop that let her see into the depths of the water, a bottom so deep she could not fathom it.
What water she and her mother had dug deep into the ground for at her home, likely it came from a pool such as this, hidden away by blood magic, protected by the same.
But the water was drying up everywhere else on the land.
Except here.
She closed her eyes to the thought.
Amece might have imprisoned him in the sea, stripped him of his ability to see this bounty, to walk on the land, but to think to bring her people here, offer them sanctuary here where they needn’t fear the drought, that would be a betrayal that went far beyond when Ouros was bound.
What if his rains were not enough to save her lands?
Chapter Thirty-Four
He woke alone in his cave. Though her heat was a mild thing in comparison to his own, he enjoyed having it beside him as he slept. The press of her slight body to his side, burrowing int
o his scales for warmth, gave him comfort, much as it had when she freed him from the waters, when he stole away from her in the dark light of morning before she woke, and he could not escape.
He’d come back.
He’d had to come back.
What was it about this woman, so like her grandmother, so unlike as well, that called to him?
Surely others had stood upon the seashore over the centuries and called out to the dragon beneath the waves? She could not have been the first, and yet she was the first he heard. The first he listened to, that he wanted to know.
Ouros stretched, his tail snaking over his back, curling against his shoulder, his muscles tensing and relaxing. Storms, but it was good to be able to stretch like that.
The thought made him smile.
He pushed himself to his feet, ambled off of the soft bedding that had weathered the years amicably, out of his cavern to his rock sitting beneath the sun, warmed and welcoming in the center of the grotto. The moss that had overgrown it was velvet soft against his belly, unperturbed by the brushing of his scales against it. He lumbered into position, crossing his arms beneath his head.
She was splashing at the water’s edge, the falls that fed the pool cool and crisp, though the heat of the day would make the chill welcome enough when warmed by the sun.
He stretched out his wings. The sharpened claws at the ends flexed like fingertips. They were as black as his nails, as deadly.
Her fingers ghosted over the edge of his strut, skimmed the silken membrane of his underwing.
He opened one eye to watch her, the intense expression on her face as she moved from his side to beneath the great expanse of blue-black.
Ever fascinated by him.
He was surprisingly as fascinated by her. “You did not swim?”
The long stretch of her neck, exposed by the way she’d pulled her hair to bundle atop her head, stiffened, the column of her spine straightening though she did not turn to answer him. Her touch soothed over the healing wound where the spears had been struck through his membranes.
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