Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Ninteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mated to the Dragon
The Exalted Dragons: Book 3
K.T Stryker
© 2017
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Table of Contents
Chapter One 4
Chapter Two 11
Chapter Three 15
Chapter Four 23
Chapter Five 26
Chapter Six 33
Chapter Seven 42
Chapter Eight 49
Chapter Nine 57
Chapter Ten 60
Chapter Eleven 68
Chapter Twelve 73
Chapter Thirteen 76
Chapter Fourteen 82
Chapter Fifteen 89
Chapter Sixteen 95
Chapter Seventeen 100
Chapter Eighteen 106
Chapter Ninteen 112
Chapter Twenty 118
Chapter Twenty-One 123
Chapter Twenty-Two 129
Chapter Twenty-Three 136
Chapter Twenty-Four 142
Chapter One
Theo
We are the longing of what we were, and if we are lucky enough, we are never what we loathe. But that is the thing with us humans—we always end up becoming what we loathe. Why is it that the whole of the human civilization begs for freedom when it is the slave of its own beliefs? It may be that our biggest enemy is our unawareness, the one that we force upon our minds as if it were the prisoner of our hearts’ deepest and most twisted desires. Or maybe it is the other way around.
I don’t know how to start this, but I’ll eventually get there. It just takes a little bit of attention and much time to achieve that, and I’m on the way. It started out with something that I wasn’t around to witness. It was years before I was even born that all of this started, but the way it got to this massive hole of nothingness was partly due to my active indulgence.
The villagers used to always say that humans are self-destructive. They described themselves perfectly. I saw the irony in that statement and caught it when I was young whenever I saw their bodies worn out and dripping with sweat when the sun set. It made me wonder why they sweated to their own self-destruction? Was apathy that strong?
But I was young and unaware. I didn’t know that the world was so much more complicated than my mother’s love. I thought that what I saw was all that was and that all I observed was all that is, but I was wrong.
There was a castle behind the range of mountains that blocked the setting sun from our village. That was where King Harold lived. It was also where he had all the animals that were butchered to ease our hunger. Every week, rations of bread and meat would be sent by the king to the villagers who had done work for him. They destroyed themselves to be fed by that king.
In the beginning, I thought the king was different from all of us. Perhaps he had a golden heart or a platinum brain, but it wasn’t so. The only thing that was different about him was that he had been concealed from the whole of humanity. We only heard stories of what he looked like, how he spoke, and how he slayed any man who stood against him. His secret was his identity, and he only kept it so that his power would be thought of as divine.
However, my secret was divine on its own because it wasn’t mine alone—it was hers more than it was mine.
She kissed me for the first time when she revealed her secret to me, and I learned the art of loyalty and faith because of that brief kiss—from the moment she confided in me until later in this tale.
I saw her hide behind the bushes across from where I lived. She was so immersed in everything that she did just like the child she was, her innocence hid behind the veil of mystery that she wore. And when she took it off, it was only to show me that pride and mystery are two different things—one’s a sin and the other a defence.
Elise was a magic spell cast over my soul when I was nine years old. When Elise was seven years old, two years younger than I was, her mother brought her to our house and left her. Elise didn’t shed a tear. Instead, she stared at her mother’s rivers of tears. Her mother was on her knees, begging Matilda, my mother, to keep her safe and to treat her like her own child. Elise’s mother let and never returned.
I was oblivious to what was happening, but I knew that her tears meant that she was suffering. Later, I learned that Elise’s mother was called by the king to become one of the women of his castle. They say that she was the most beautiful woman in the village and the king was infatuated. Her gray eyes and silver hair brought any man to his knees, and the king wanted her on her knees for him.
I stood in the yard when Matilda embraced Elise and took her into our house. I was distant at first, maybe because I was startled by the beauty in her eyes. It was like seeing a candle flame dance and knowing that if I touched it I would get burned.
Our rations of food were divided among the three of us. I gave Elise half of my bread every day because she was pale for the first couple of weeks.
There was a curfew in the village. The king had a rule that no one could leave their home after the sun set. Whomever was seen outside would be taken to the king’s castle, and we would never hear about them again.
It was true people did disappear, but that never stopped little Elise and I from sneaking out and breathing the moonlight into our skin. The moon was a round, red flame that hung on the purple sky. It seemed like it was fading into the dying or dead stars behind it. My mother once told me that the moon was white before the great war, the one that dehumanized the earth.
“Theo, my dear,” she once whispered into my ears before she went to sleep, “sometimes I see in your eyes the world before it died, and other times, I see it as it will be made.”
I never understood what she meant by that. The only world I knew was the one formed from the remnants of the dead world, and the world seemed like it would never change.
My mother had stacks of dusty books that she kept hidden under a wooden plank beside her bed. She had to keep the books concealed because the king’s Hawks used to search all the houses for literature. Literature was forbidden, whether you wrote it or kept it, and you would be killed if it were found in your possession.
But my mother read those books of hers every day, and at nights would sit me and Elise down and tell us her version. S
he told us the story of what the world was before the war.
“Everything was electronic,” she said, expecting me to know what “electronic” meant. “The whole world was connected, everyone knew everyone, and everyone feared everyone.”
“But isn’t it better than all the world fearing King Harold?” Elise questioned with great conviction in her green eyes.
“It’s better if there were no fear at all,” mother replied.
What I understood was that some time ago, in what they called the “twenty-second century,” the west thought the east was different. People were cursed with different figures and looked slightly different.
“They were idiots,” Matilda said. “They were all exactly the same, but because of different eyes or skin color, they thought they were different from others. And you know how we feel about different things—we fear them. That fear is what made the big explosions.”
Explosions in the sky. She said it was called a “nuclear war.” She said that people bombed each other until they all died. Only a few remained. Mom said we were lucky to be of the ones who remained, but she never lived long enough to see my curse. It wasn’t only my curse—it was also the secret.
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Chapter Two
Elise
There was only darkness. I remembered little of her, even minutes after she left. There remained nothing of her in my mind. Perhaps that was my way of grieving, of forgetting.
I knew that my father had been taken by King Harold, drafted into the army for the second time after being one of the few who came back. I hadn’t begun walking, so I had no memories of him either.
My mother’s image fleeted away the moment she left me by their door. Thankfully, that door held behind it a home that never left my heart. Weeks before that day, the king’s Hawks had come by our house several times.
The first time they showed up, I saw my mother’s face turn pale and her eyes show surprise.
“Elise, go to your room,” she shouted. “Run.” Her voice fell to a whisper.
I stayed silent and didn’t ask any questions. But of course I didn’t go to my room. I hid behind the kitchen door and looked through the slit where the hinges were.
They entered after knocking the second time. My mother hadn’t opened the door for them yet, but they found their way in with no consideration for the people inside. Even as a child, I saw what they were and understood the effect of power on people like this. They were given power and authority over the common men, and even with that little power they still felt as if they were gods.
As if every other man’s possessions were theirs, they went inside our house and went straight to the window where my mom left her paintings to dry. They snatched two of her paintings and started walking toward the door.
Mother cherished her paintings more than anything. She once told me something that I can never forget. Even though I should have been too young to remember the sentence word by word, I surprisingly did.
I had asked her why she painted all the time and why she stood staring at her paintings for a while with an unbreakable smile on her face. She looked at me as if the answer was obvious. Remembering that I was a child, she took my hand and explained, “I try to capture beauty on those worn-out canvases, hoping that if I have many of them, I would have something that captures some of the beauty of your father’s soul.”
I didn’t really understand what she meant by “father.” I knew that the villagers all had fathers, but I didn’t know what it felt like to have a father. So, I nodded and the words sunk into my head, somehow finding a resting place that kept them safe for a lifetime.
The last time the Hawks came to our house was the time my life was turned upside down. They didn’t speak. They didn’t even respond to my mother’s endless questions. She kept asking them why they wanted to take away all her paintings.
“The king wanted the paintings, and now he wants the painter,” one of them said.
I didn’t think twice. I ran from behind the kitchen door to one of them and leaped toward him with all my power, thinking that I could push him away from my mother as he grabbed her arms and dragged her. I hit my head hard against the silver armor he wore around his waist. I fell to the ground. Mother fled from the Hawk’s grasp and held me in her arms. She begged him to take me with her.
“The king asked for the painter and only her,” he responded coldly while grabbing her arms again and pulling her away from me.
“Let me take her somewhere, to Matilda’s. She’ll take care of her until I come back,” she begged him.
The Hawk gave her a look of sympathy and smiled as if mocking her hopes of ever coming back. There was a bit of humanity in that heartless creature, and that was how I ended up on Theo’s doorstep.
Chapter Three
Theo
I was too young to work with the villagers by the mountain ranges. When kids turned twelve, the king would take them to work by the mountain ranges. They would dig and mine for whatever the king ordered them to and would return to their homes by sunset. I was eleven years old. I didn’t keep count of my years. Neither did Matilda or Elise, but the king’s Hawks did.
The king’s Hawks knew everything about everyone, and even though I tried to hide it from them, they knew I had six fingers on every hand. Everyone else had only five fingers, but for some odd reason I had six.
My fingers never bothered me until the day my secret was revealed to Elise. She laughed about my peculiar hands. I was sitting by the swings hanging from the willow tree near the slope that led down to the valleys. Elise was playing with the red rocks scattered all around us. She was building a small castle with the rocks, and I went over to help her.
I picked up one of the rocks and put them on top of the castle. Elise was on her knees and looked up and told me that it was uneven. She held my hand and moved it away from the castle, and that was when she noticed the sixth finger. She smiled, saw a hint of insecurity in my eyes and decided to laugh about it.
A tear fell from my eyes, and I ran to the swing, hid my face in my hands and swung high, hoping I could hide behind the sun.
“I’m sorry I laughed,” she said as I swung harder to ignore her. “Theo, get down.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” I told her and, contradicting myself, stopped swinging.
“But you’re sad, and I want you to be happy,” she said and held my hand, softly pressing my sixth finger.
I couldn’t stop myself from smiling when her lips stretched to welcome my little aching heart. I smiled, and she went behind me to push me on the swing. I could go higher when I swung alone, but it was comforting when she was the one pushing it.
“It’s not a bad thing, you know,” she said softly.
“How do you know what’s bad or not? I have six fingers. I’m different. I’m ugly,” I replied in a trembling voice.
“I like it.” She stopped the swing and turned to look into my eyes. “You’re not like everyone else. You’re different, special.”
I believed her. I always thought that something was different about me. It wasn’t that I was self-absorbed, even though all kids are, but I had always felt an emotion I knew no one felt. I can’t name the emotion, but it was the opposite of silence. I wasn’t satisfied with the way the world was, and I wanted to change it. But the world was Harold’s kingdom. There was nothing that could possibly linger beyond those black seas around us.
It was time to go back to the house and eat with Matilda. I took Elise by the hand and ran above the valleys and through the compressed trees and finally to our house in the village.
On a normal d
ay, we would sit on the ground and eat while mother told us about the adventures in the books upstairs.
That day was different, though. While running back home, I found myself ahead of Elise. It was odd because I usually fell and rolled on the ground in failed attempts to catch up with her. This time, however, she was panting behind me, her hands clasping onto the bark of a tree.
“Elise, what’s wrong?” I shouted, but it seemed like she couldn’t hear me.
I ran back to her, and there was something wrong with her eyes. They were glowing red, and her skin was reflecting that glow in her eyes. It was the first time I ever saw Elise weak. I was startled. She was the one to always pick me up in my weaknesses, and this was the first time I had to be stronger.
I held her hand and felt as if I were dragging her all the way back to the house. She was panting hard when we reached the house. Matilda didn’t notice something was wrong with Elise because Elise was hiding her face.
After minutes of sitting down, and in the middle of mother’s story, Elise said she had to go to the bathroom. There was something wrong. I stood to follow her, but Matilda held me down. She told me Elise was going through something all girls her age went through. I didn’t understand, but I had to accept it.
Maybe it was curiosity that propelled me to learn the secret, but most I knew I had to trust my instinct. I told Matilda I wanted my meat cooked more. She liked to attend to our wants, and she liked feeling as if she spoiled us.
She continued the story as she turned her back to me and stood by the stove. I made sure the wooden planks under me wouldn’t make a sound when I moved. I put my hand on one end of the plank and my foot on the other and pulled myself up.
I tiptoed to the bathroom. I was worried Elise might have been bitten by one of the snakes that crept up from the valleys to the swing. She had taken too long inside the bathroom, and so I opened the door without even knocking and witnessed something that would launch the greatest change of my life.
Mated by The Alpha Dragon: The Exalted Dragons (Book 3) Page 1