Guardian of the Wingless

CW: Scene of death and blood

Part Three of Ersoa’s Awakening

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The Valley wasn’t always burning, and the skies weren’t always hazed with ember clouds. The days didn’t always feel as long and hopeless as this one — the day of the firestorm, the unexpected surfacing of buried history.

“We must return to the meadow,” Renthe yelled over the resounding air streams.

Rowan, the pegasus on which she rode, veered to the left, deftly avoiding a cloud of black smoke. The cries of what she knew sorrowfully to be the call of a dying dryad echoed from the forest below. Her empathetic tears dried suddenly in the wind — no time to mourn within the unfolding disaster.

“How many?” she wondered. How many of the mountainly beasts could they flee? How long would it take for their fire to reach the meadow? Could they evacuate quickly enough to save everyone? What of the centaurs and their young who had not yet learned to run? Would they be caught in the blaze? The unanswered worries were like a flurry of pixies in her head. She couldn’t concentrate on anything other than signs of the amber dragon marking the sky again.

The first time she glimpsed the creature was only minutes before. Rowan was grazing in the forest just west of Mountain Ridge Village, and Renthe was scavenging for a quick snack like bramble berries. Then, as if a fallen constellation, the glimmering scales plummeted from the tip of a northward mountain straight toward Renthe and the pegasus. She had never before mounted so quickly. Moved by instinct, she urged Rowan to ascend, still processing what she had seen.

The ensuing chase lasted for what seemed like hours, but it was likely only seconds. Rowan, the most athletic of the studs, just barely managed to stay ahead of the clamorous wingspan. With every veer or attempt to evade, the ancient beast followed. She didn’t realize it was a dragon until she looked backward and stared the fierce, sickle-toothed menace in the eyes. Its glare, held on her for some sort of eternity, spoke only of resentment.

She could do nothing except prepare for death. She embraced Rowan, her closest companion, for what she imagined was the last time. Then, the dragon vanished, suddenly diving into the forest in chase of movement down below. She couldn’t understand an explanation for why they were spared except that, maybe, whatever was down there in the Valley was more valuable than the pair.

As the forest blazed in the distance, and what seemed to be the colossal bodies of numerous dragons dove from the cliffs above, Rowan pushed southward to the lakeside meadow. It had been a week since their departure. Pegosyne, warden of the herd, sent her on a quest to find a unicorn who could be tamed. She and Rowan were returning empty handed and with dreadful news.

Relief overcame her body as they descended upon the meadow and saw it was still untouched by dragon fire, but a heavy silence stung the air. Already, she knew something was wrong. In a panic, she unmounted and sprinted toward the lake where the herd usually grazed, the long blades of grass slicing her bare calves as she trudged.

“Pegosyne?” she sighed, broken tears streaking her face, as she tried to deny what she had discovered.

The proud centaur, whose destiny was to protect the pegasus herd, stood silently overwatching the lake, his body and spear fixed in stone.

“Who did this to you?” she cried, a dreadful realization coming to mind.

This wasn’t the work of dragons. A quiet murmur, the whimper of a wounded creature sounded from the bank. She tore herself away from Pegosyne’s side with Rowan trotting behind and raced toward the noise. The lake was stained crimson. Her knees gave away as she realized what happened, still crawling forward despite her heartache.

A dozen pegasi had been felled, their wings severed, foals and grown alike. The bloodied bodies of her friends were scattered alongside the bank, some clothed in the shallows, and the centaurs were gone save the statue of Pegosyne, their kin. She didn’t know what could be salvaged from this disaster, but her cry echoed across the water as she dragged herself toward the whimper.

It was Saresa, the youngest of the foals. Renthe caressed her face as Rowan neighed in a fierce outburst. Despite the seeping stubs between her shoulders, she survived, suffering. Renthe listened closely and realized there were more distant whimpers of others who were still alive. “Why?” she wondered. Why steal their wings yet let them live? Distant memories begged to surface, but she denied them, not ready to face that pain again. She was terrified of whatever mage or creature had left behind this tragedy, but stood suddenly, pressing back her fears as she realized there was still time to save them.

“Aralia!” Renthe called as she mounted Rowan and trotted into the dense forest.

The dryad was rooted somewhere nearby, and hopefully well enough to help them.

“Aralia!” Renthe called again, searching for the tree with indigo veins.

“Renthe?” the whisper cut crisply through the woods. “I’m here.”

Suddenly, the trunk to their right swayed, revealing a face twisted with a mournful expression.

“Are you okay?” Renthe asked, palming the dryad’s bark and looking for injuries.

“No … I have lost my sister in the woodland north,” Aralia divulged woefully. “Did you hear her?”

Renthe nodded, sorrow staining her face as she remembered the sonorous call in the Valley below when they escaped the amber dragon.

“I’m sorry, truly,” Renthe consoled.

“I feel that you are …” Aralia said, unrooting from the dirt and shaking her branches. “Yet, you are taken by a pain of your own,” the dryad observed, brushing a leaf across Renthe’s damp cheek.

“Have you been to the lake?” Renthe asked, tears welling again as she remembered the gory sight.

“No, I have been communing with the roots, trying to warn others of the dragon fire,” she said gravely.

“Come, please! They are dying,” Renthe urged as she and Rowan guided Aralia out of the woods.

It was a unique sight; the usually calm and languid dryad was running, stretching her ancient twigs and branches to fuel the next expansive step. Renthe had never witnessed something like it, and she knew by the fury in her movement that she wasn’t ready to accept more misfortune.

Yet, a sudden, unwanted bitterness grew in Renthe’s thoughts, and she couldn’t ignore it. Aralia had so often helped Pegosyne care for the herd during times of turmoil. Why not now when they were maimed and nearly slaughtered?

“Darling,” Aralia sighed as she approached Saresa and pulled her feeble body into her limbs.

Renthe pushed the invasive question away as she witnessed the dryad’s empathy. Surely, there was a good explanation for her idleness, but that wasn’t important now. All she cared about was saving the wingless.

“Can you heal their wounds?” she asked Aralia desperately.

“Most … hopefully,” she said as she scanned the carnage on the bank.

“How can we help?” Renthe offered, wondering how many had already bled out.

“We must gather them. I will heal them together,” Aralia decided, cradling the still whimpering foal against her chest.

Three had perished long before they arrived. Two drowned in their struggle, lungs full of water. The backside of the third had been torn from shoulders to tail. She wondered if she would have time to bury them before the fire came. As they gathered the nine others, confusion washed over her. This wasn’t the entire herd.

“I thought they escaped,” Aralia confessed as she arranged them in a circle around her.

“What do you mean?” Renthe asked, holding onto the limp hoof of the elder, Arsephon.

“Two days past, a satyr and his companion visited the meadow to warn the centaurs of an approaching danger, of what kind, it wasn’t sure. They evacuated eastward, taking most of the herd with them, but there was a small group grazing west toward the gorge. Pegosyne assured that he would find them and reunite with the others. He must have been too late,” Aralia explained as her roots stretched outward, wrapping carefully around the bodies of the wounded.

“Pegosyne,” Renthe cried, and Rowan brushed his nose against her neck in comfort. “Who could have done that?”

“There is only one creature I know …” Aralia paused, focusing carefully on her healing.

Under the dryad’s nurture, the weak and wingless pegasi began to stir.

“Gorgons,” Aralia recalled. “They are known to move stone and turn creatures into marble, but they haven’t been seen for as long as the …” she paused again, perhaps in disbelief.

“For as long as the dragons?” Renthe asked, her body frozen from the memory of the amber beast’s resentment.

“Tell me, please, did you see the dragon who burned the forest northward?” Aralia asked, carefully unwrapping her roots from the healed.

“There were more, but the one I encountered in the forest had amber scales. It was swift and fierce,” Renthe recounted.

“Viori,” Aralia m0aned.

The dryad’s lowest leaves were wilting most likely from her efforts of healing. Magic used must come from somewhere a beautiful mage once enlightened her. Renthe palmed Aralia’s bark again, thankful to discover it was still stiff like iron.

“How do you know its name?” Renthe asked, wisps of happiness seeping into her core as she observed the wingless herd find their footing.

“There is only one with a color like that. He is the last of Ersoa’s Immortal Thunder,” Aralia said with the bittersweetness of a buried history as she shook the brittle leaves off her twigs.

Ersoa. The legend called her the first and oldest of the dragons. She had disappeared long before Renthe or Rowan’s time just as the Giants and Behemoths alike. However, it seemed Aralia remembered her offspring. Dryads, slothly creatures, were known to live for centuries. Renthe found it difficult to make sense of the unfoldings.

There was a gorgon afoot, severing pegasi wings, most likely for some cruel concoction. Renthe couldn't figure any other reason for it, and the careless selfishness burned a storm hotter than Viori’s in her chest. The blaze was still growing, and the dragons were restored as lords of the sky. She thought about the rest of the herd, wondering, wherever they were, if they knew about the dangers of flying. And what of the satyr? How had he known of the incoming danger days before?

She trudged alone toward the statue of Pegosyne, worries fluttering again in her head like pixies. Rowan allowed her the distance, supporting the weight of his friend, Raidia, as she tried to overcome her wounded spirit. The harshly familiar image stirred memories that weakened her body to the point of kneeling beside the centaur and weeping.

“How will we survive this?” she begged an answer from his lifeless form.

He responded, not in presence, but rather the recollection of their meeting decades ago when Renthe was just a youngling. She wrapped her arm over her shoulder, fingertips grazing past the stumps between the blades, and the ache from that day surfaced.

_

“Who did this?” Pegosyne asked as he approached Renthe, who had been abandoned among the carnage of her people.

“Creantes,” she cried softly, unwilling to raise her gaze toward the massacre.

Those awful mages often scavenged for rare ingredients to concoct their potions — unicorn horns, pixie dust, fairy wings — whatever they needed to make their patrons happy.

“What is a fairy without wings?” she sobbed as Pegosyne lifted her onto his back.

“I will show you,” he promised.

In the meadow, while Aralia’s roots soothed her wounds, a lone pegasus wandered. He seemed almost as weary as she had been.

“His name is Rowan. He lost his family too,” Pegosyne explained.

_

The union of the two meant something she could never quite express until that moment when she gazed at the statue of the fatherly centaur and wished desperately to hear his voice again.

“Rowan completed me in a way no one else could,” she told the statue, wondering if a part of him could somehow hear her. “I was the family he needed then, and you brought us together.”

She gazed back toward Aralia and the wingless herd. Now, they needed the bonded pair to guide them out of the burning Valley, hide them from the dangers who were lording the mountains and skies. She doubted her strength, the fortitude she would need to reunite them with the others, something not even Pegosyne could do.

Then, she looked at his preserved bravery and realized it was nurtured not on his own but because of the bond he shared with the others. Together, they were strong enough to escape the firestorm, find another meadow to eventually graze in peace.

“If there is a way, I will free you. I promise,” she whispered to the statue as she kissed his cheek.

Aralia had buried the fallen, and the herd was giving respects upon their graves with the nudge of their noses when she returned. Renthe embraced Rowan, thinking of their union, the few moments that morning when she was sure they would die, and she cried into his mane.

“Will you come with us?” Renthe asked Aralia after gathering her composure.

“My sister, Hollae, was the last of my kind in the Valley. I have no reason left to stay,” she decided, still cradling Saresa against her trunk.

Aralia’s druid had disappeared years ago, and she had tended to the forest on her own since. She wished there was something she could do to save the trees before the blaze reached them, but it was the way of their world. When dragons surface, the forests burn.

“Which direction,” Renthe pondered.

“The others were traveling east around the bend toward the Windermore River,” Aralia recalled, her tallest branches swaying in the smoky breeze.

“But the firestorm, won’t it keep spreading south even past the meadow?” Renthe worried, considering all the other creatures who would be stuck in the blaze.

“Most likely,” Aralia guessed. “Those in the west have been warned but not the south.”

“What will happen to them? The other dryads, the river nymphs, the wolves?” Renthe worried.

“They will burn without warning,” Aralia prophesied.

The southernmost forest of the Valley was Renthe’s birthplace. She held fondly onto the scarce memories of the enchanted woodland and its inhabitants. She was torn. Eastward, they had a chance of reunion with the herd and protection of the centaurs, who had become like kin. Yet, in doing so, it was almost like they were forsaking those in the south, some who had been in deep hibernations for years.

She glanced once more at the statue of Pegosyne, thinking of that day when he ventured alone into the strange land based on a rumor, and saved a fairy youngling from her abandoned fate. She held desperately onto that same bravery and realized they must do the same. Although wingless, her little herd still had a swiftness that could outrun the blaze. They would need it to save the helpless. What she had decided was dangerous, but she realized after facing Viori that morning, danger would always find them.

“We will go south.”

***

Hello, wanderers!

This is Part Three of the Ersoa's Awakening serial. Other parts can be read as linked below.

Part Two

Part One

Part Four