by Halie Fewkes
“You might not be powerful yet, Leaf, but I bet that someday you will be. So be proud to be different.”
Leaf took a deep breath, then said, “I’d rather have friends.”
His longing saddened me, but I smiled anyway. “You’ve already got one, right here, because I know you’re going to do amazing things.”
Leaf pulled the hat from his head, and said, “I guess I can try.” His messy hair had the vibrancy of deep orange flames, which no longer seemed strange to me. It fit his lively personality. “I guess I just have to find something great to do.”
“You could help me, if you wanted,” I said, noticing no more dragons leaping into the sky. “See where they’re starting to land the dragons? I need a distraction so I can sneak into the cave and steal one.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Leaf asked, eyes wide.
I laughed and said, “I just want to fly on it. I’ll put it back.”
“But the magic of the eclipse is about to wear off.”
“Then we should move fast!”
Leaf nodded as I stood up, and he ran ahead of me to the group removing the saddles. The sight of him was peculiar enough to catch their attention, and just as he began to ask them questions, his voice was drowned out by Shadar the storyteller, who told the valley, “It’s time to come out of the flames and stop jumping from treetops. Yes, you, with the sharpened swords, you’re about to severely regret playing with those! Happy Eclipsival! See you again in seventeen years!”
I grabbed the closest saddle and slipped into the gaping cave as the valley cheered for the end of the festivities. Accomplishment burned in my chest, just from helping Leaf. The cave dropped abruptly into a pit, and I climbed down the jagged handholds with a smile lightening my life. If saving a kid from a bully rewarded me with this much warmth and purpose, I could hardly fathom the fulfillment of saving a life.
Two dragons rested in the cavern depths, each the size of a gigantic horse with talons and teeth longer than my fingers. The dragon with deep red scales was curled up, sleeping, while the second raised his head and snorted smoke at me. With brown, green, and black patterns swirled over his back, he stood stock still with alert eyes.
I took a careful step forward, and the dragon simply watched me, as though daring me to take another. When I stepped to the side of him and threw the bulk of the saddle onto his back, he snapped his head back to glare fiercely.
It took a few minutes to secure every strap and buckle on the saddle, and the dragon watched every step of the process through angry eyes. I had plenty of time to question my insane motives as I double checked my work. Maybe danger could bring my memories back, but those memories wouldn’t do me any good if this dragon killed me.
The list of tally marks from my room wandered back to my mind, reminding me of how important it was to recover my memories. I had saved so many lives. What if people were dying right now because I wasn’t doing whatever I was supposed to be? And I might still need redemption for the fourteen tally marks on the other side of the list. I didn’t even deserve to call myself Allie when I didn’t understand what they meant.
I bent to undo a thick linked chain from around the dragon’s leg. I hadn’t lost the feeling that he was about to turn and attack me, but I was determined to use that fear to my advantage so I jumped on the dragons back, feeling shaky in the saddle. The dragon unfurled its wings and stretched each as far as it would reach, shaking its head as though waking from hibernation. I took a few deep breaths, not sure how to take off, and not sure the dragon was going to wait for my signal.
“Is that you, Allie? What are you doing?” a man asked from the mouth of the cave.
“Flying a dragon,” I replied, trying to keep my voice from shaking. We both knew the magic from the eclipse would no longer protect me.
“I thought you couldn’t remember anything. Do you remember how to fly?”
I dug my knees into the dragon’s sides, and he leapt up with amazing force to land on the mouth of the cave, next to the man asking the question.
“No!” I shouted, my answer drowned out by the deafening roar the dragon let out before jumping up to catch the wind under his wings. I held tightly to the saddle, sure I was going to fall off as each wing stroke jumped us higher, and the dragon seemed eager to scrape me off in the clouds. Either I was about to remember how this worked, or I was probably going to die.
Chapter Eight
Holy life, I was reckless!
The dragon streaked through the clouds, thrilled to be out of the cave below. Too thrilled. I clung to the manic beast with every limb, and my plan wasn’t sounding brilliant anymore. If I didn’t figure out how to control him fast, he was going to throw me off in his excitement.
I let go of the saddle to grab the reins in one unbalanced swipe, yanking them back. The dragon slowed to glide on the wind currents, no longer racing ahead. I remembered! I also realized that leaning forward would make him dip lower, and I directed him to skim around the treetops as small flashes of past trials and errors reminded me of my favorite flight tricks.
I could make him do a backward flip without being thrown off, although I knew a forward flip would be too much to ask for. The sensations of rising and plummeting in the air were fantastic, but also familiar. I could remember them.
I wanted to return to the ground to tell Liz of my revelations, but I loved flying. Maybe my past would have an easier time returning while I was in the air anyway. The dragon seemed to love the sky as much as I did, so we watched as the crowd of thousands vacated the valley and the fire in the middle burned down to glowing embers.
I had hoped for a flood of memories to wash in with the recollection of flying, but I had no such luck. I had thought that at least a small stream of the past would reward my risk-taking, but I didn’t even get a puddle of my old identity. If memories were like water, mine were all secluded in lonely buckets. I had remembered how to fly, and that was all.
We stayed in the sky for hours, but not near the festivities. Instead, the dragon and I flew over moonlit streams and the gigantic needled cedars that grew around the Dragona. I even saw a muscular tama cat, with short golden hair and black-tipped ears, hunkered among dark branches.
I had plenty of time to think with only the wind whistling past my ears, and I knew for certain that my survival instincts were pulling up memories from the past to save me. By getting lost earlier, I had learned that this phenomenon only worked when my life was truly in danger. Now I also knew that I could only remember things directly related to the danger. I remembered how to fly a dragon when my life depended on it. I had only remembered how to hinder an Escali’s senses because they were chasing me, and I only remembered the importance of bravery when they caught me. I probably wouldn’t have remembered anything about the first Escali attack if I hadn’t been scared stiff by the sound of distant shrieks and approaching footsteps.
Then what did I need to do to remember my secret past? I would have to be in some danger related to it, but I had no idea how I had saved so many lives. I only knew that my life-saving secrets had somehow angered the Escalis, which brought to mind an idea I wished I could unthink.
The only danger that would make me remember that past would involve the Escalis. The idea of Escali-related peril terrified me, but the torment of the tally marks in my room may have been even worse.
The dragon beneath my legs finally began to tire and glided to the entrance of its cave as I decided to ask Anna about joining some sort of mission against the Escalis. I needed to figure out what I had been doing, no matter the risk.
The dragon plunged into its steep pit in a startling nose dive. I thought we were going to crash and die until he pulled up, skipped across the ground like a stone, and skidded to a stop before slamming into the back wall.
“Good to see you’re still alive,” I heard from Liz, who was leaning against a rock in clear irritation.
“Liz,” I said with a smile, leaping from the saddle. “I thou
ght you would be in bed.”
“How would I be able to sleep when you’re in the sky on a dragon you don’t know how to fly? One of the reckless ones too.”
The dragon and I had a reckless streak in common. “Well, thanks for waiting,” I said as I stroked his green and black nose, realizing he wasn’t really glaring at me. “So, you can tell these dragons apart?”
“Sometimes, but I know this one in particular. I actually remember bottle feeding him when he was a baby. Can you believe that? I feel like he and I grew up together. I even gave him a name once, but I won’t tell you what it is.”
“Interesting,” I said, failing to have any interest in what Liz had named the thing. “We should probably get to bed soon.”
“Alright, here, let me help you get the saddle off,” she said stepping forward to help loosen the straps. “And make sure you put the chain back on him. You can get Time if you let one of the dragons loose.”
“Time?” I repeated.
“Come on, you know what Time is. The kind that’s a punishment.”
“Trying to have you explain things is a punishment,” I groaned.
She pulled her lip back in an exaggerated, sisterly sneer to let me know what she thought of my complaint. “Time speeds your mind up so fast that you get tons of time to think things over. There’s absolutely nothing to do but think. If you accidentally lose one of the dragons or something, then you get a month in your own mind to wish you hadn’t. But only seconds pass in real time.”
“That sounds harsh. An entire month of nothing but thought…”
“You think a month is harsh? The penalty for treason is ten thousand years.”
I thought about the severity of ten thousand years and found myself nodding slightly. “I’m guessing nobody commits treason anymore.”
“Never.”
“Then maybe it’s not such a bad rule.”
“I agree, but can you imagine? Ten thousand years, and you couldn’t end it for anything, not even to die. You would go crazy… literally.”
I would rather die than endure such a torture, and I wondered briefly if I would even wish such a punishment upon my greatest enemy.
I triple checked that I had the dragon secured properly. I didn’t know what I would do with myself if I had a month of just thought. I never wanted to find out. “Let’s stop thinking about it. I’d like to sleep tonight.”
“Me too, so let’s go and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I need you to get me to my room, Liz. I don’t know how to find it yet.”
“That’s easy. From here, you’ll need to take a right,” she gestured with her hands as though the cave system was in the air and I could see where she was directing me. “And then—”
“Liz, I’m not about to follow your directions again. You take me there, or I’m sleeping in your room.”
She snorted and said, “Fine, I’ll take you. You are the most violent sleeper in the entire world, thrashing around all the time and throwing blankets. You’re crazy.”
“I already knew that,” I said, smiling because I had been brave enough to jump on a dragon and recover a piece of my memory. “It must run in the family.”
I woke from a vivid nightmare the next morning, kicking a wad of blankets across the room in a panicked sweat. My dreaming self had crawled beneath a collapsed building to pull two injured kids into a dark night, lit only by building fires and the destructive magic of mages who had arrived too late. I had hurried the kids to the edge of the massacre, amidst clanging metal and screaming, and their fear filled faces were so clear to me, I wasn’t entirely sure it had been a dream. It might have been a memory.
An Escali had darted from the woods and picked up the younger brother as his sister shrieked and I shouted something unintelligible. I couldn’t remember what I said, but something about it had caused the predator to pause, and when he jerked his focus to me, the piercing gaze of his cloudy eyes terrified me into waking up.
I squeezed my eyes shut now, trying desperately to determine if the dream had been a memory or wishful thinking. Saving kids and battling Escalis sounded too fantastic to be real.
Since I had nowhere to be, and no knowledge of the tunnel system anyway, I deliberated on the matter and rifled through my existing thoughts as my morning time hunger turned into starvation over the course of a few hours. I didn’t expect to remember anything while safely in my room, but that didn’t keep me from trying.
Loneliness was also beginning to set in when somebody knocked on my door. I leapt from my bed to fling it open with a bit more excitement than necessary. “West! What can I do for you?”
My greeting startled him. “I was just wondering if you wanted to take a trip to the Wreck.”
“Yes, I do. The Wreck is where the food is. Let’s go!” I was already out the door and had started down the tunnel by the time I finished my sentence.
“No, Allie, it’s this way,” West said, holding back a grin.
“Right you are,” I replied, turning on my heel to head the opposite direction. West was kind enough to explain the tunnel system to me as we walked, pointing out distinctive marks and main tunnels so I could finally find my own way.
When we got to the Wreck, I was shocked to find it so empty. It was still filled with the chatter and laughter of people sitting around octagon tables, or getting up to get their dinner, but wasn’t comparable to how full it had been the previous day. Most of the venders had either left, or were just finishing their packing, and I liked this atmosphere much better.
“Allie,” Liz waved to me from one of the tables. “Come sit with us.”
“Not a chance. I’m getting food,” I replied, having no difficulty smelling exactly which way the meal was. One corner of the Wreck housed tables full of meats, an assortment of breads, a stand of vegetables, and a pile of tableware to dish up on. A pit of coals burned close by, where a few people roasted more trays of roots or birds on spits, loading them onto the table when they were done. As I piled meats onto my plate, I also kept an eye open to see if anyone else I recognized was in the Wreck.
I set my steak-dominated plate back down as I spotted Archie with Anna, just about to leave. She was the person I wanted to see most at the Dragona, with the exception of possibly Sir Avery, so I reluctantly abandoned my plate to integrate myself into their conversation. Anna had a gigantic sheathed sword slung over her shoulder as they walked.
“And you say Sir Darius recruited you?” she asked Archie, as though the massive sword didn’t burden her.
“Yeah, he said he was going to talk to you—”
“He probably already did. I’ve just been too busy to be bothered,” Anna said. “And Allie, I was just coming to find you,” she said to me. “I’ve spoken with Sir Darius, and he says he didn’t send you to Tabriel Vale, nor does he know what you were doing there. I also have bad news on the mind mages. Sir Avery still has them out on some assignment he’s calling the ‘Utmost Priority.’ I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s ignoring our every attempt to contact him.”
“Alright,” I said, already resigned to believe I would have to get my memory back on my own. Then, feeling no lead-in required, I told her, “Anna, I think I remember things when I’m in danger.”
Anna heaved the sword off her back and rested it on the ground, considering my words. When she finally spoke, she said, “I have plenty of dangerous missions I can send you on. Is that what you’re asking for?”
That was what I was asking, but the blatant proposition took me strangely by surprise. “Yes,” I replied. “But ones that I’ll live through… preferably.” I noticed a smile flicker on her lips, as though my daring encouraged her.
“I’ll find you something. Until then, why don’t you sign up for your normal chore rotations? You can start with the baby dragons in the hatchery tomorrow.”
“The hatchery?” I repeated. Bottle feeding babies had to be the safest job in the entire Dragona, a complete waste of valuable time. “I was h
oping to sign up for something like the combat dragons.”
“I don’t doubt your bravery, Allie. We’re just training Leaf out there, and he’s been talking about you all morning, asking if you can come out and help him.”
“Alright then, I guess I can. I’ve also been wondering actually, is he…” I only realized the question might be inappropriate halfway through, and by then, I had to finish it. “Yours?”
“No,” Anna replied, “although I wish he was. He thinks his parents were killed by Escalis, but they’re alive and well on Tekada. They abandoned him the day his hair came in orange, and Tekada exiled him to our war zone.”
I frowned in disbelief and said, “The more I hear about Tekada, the less I like it.”
Anna assured me, “On Tekada’s great list of offenses, this one rates near the bottom. I need to leave, but I’ll let you know if I find a mission for you. Or if one of our mind mages returns.”
“And I can show you how to sign up for chores,” Archie said. “Sir Darius just put me on the list earlier today.”
“Yes, do that,” Anna said, heaving the great sword back onto her shoulder to leave. I’ll keep trying to get a mind mage back here for you, Allie, but in the meantime just let me know if you’re ever in need of anything. You were important to the Dragona before your incident, and I’d much rather get the old you back than have you as a new recruit to train.”
Her comment stung as she left us, but I knew it shouldn’t. She’d meant to give me a compliment by telling me how important I was… was being the key term though. Used to be. The same as how I used to be the sister Liz relied on. I allowed my shoulders to slouch, resenting my empty mind and directionless heart more than anyone else ever could. Didn’t anyone know I would trade my right arm to recover my past? I used to have a purpose. I used to save lives. I would ache to have that meaning back, even without their reminders.
I thought I kept my contemplations concealed behind a blank expression, but Archie picked up on them. As we watched Anna exit the Wreck, he said, “You know, my sister used to tell me that some compliments are like a hug and a backstab at the same time. I wouldn’t worry too much about that one. You seem to have plenty going for you, just the way you are.”