Aethenea 28
28. Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth? 31. Who are they the most glad to have met?
28.Cooly, the Matriarch stared down at her grandson; his questions were beginning to make her scales itch. He had always been too clever for his own good. Something he’d inherited from Ivona.
“Of course you don’t have her eyes,” she said, her lip curling upward in a sneer. “Like the rest of her looks, they were unforgettably colored. And what does your appearance or similarities to Ivona matter? Care more about getting your chores done, boy.”
The crestfallen drooping of the boy’s crests and wings would have made any other dragon in her clan feel for him. He’d never known his dam, only heard stories about her, and even those were short and vague. In a clan that placed so much importance on the relationship between dam and progen, it would have tugged at the hearstrings of anyone else.
But not Aethenea. After she was finished speaking, she gave him her back, and only half listened to the lad as he shuffled off. Not soon after, she dozed off, and dreamed of him staring up at her from his eggshell...reliving the moment he hatched and while, during the hatching thinking, quite plainly,
He looks just like his mother before she died.
31.“Well?” Aethenea’s claws scrabbled through the crystals in the hollowed out shell, eyes darting between the colors and the golden form half-dragging himself through the cavern opening. When she held two of the red gems in her claws, she almost threw the shell from herself in her haste to reach her mate. The gems came within inches of the deep wounds along his neck and shoulder when he flinched away, the pale gems along his shoulders and sides began to glow.
“Get those useless things away from me, vile woman,” he hissed, his large paw gently pushing her claws away. Aethenea turned to watch him as he brushed past her and further into the cave, falling heavily onto her haunches as the silence stretched on.
“Is,” she finally pressed, swallowing heavily at the dryness in her throat, “is it done, then?”
“Is what done? The task you forced on me has reached it’s bloody end, or do you not see me bleeding yet still?!” As he spoke his words reached a snarl, and she told herself that it was more to do with his pain than any misplaced anger at her. It had to be done. There was no other way to keep their secret safe. There wasn’t any other way...exile, cutting their tongues out. This had been the only way.
Years before, when she’d been alone for years after The Mountain Lord had cast her out, she’d silenced many voices that hadn’t been her own that constantly belittled her decisions and thoughts. Eventually the only voice she listened to was her own, and of course her dear Steinhart’s. And she listened to her own inner voice reassuring her as she helped her wounded mate into their nest, and for the first time she began to silence him too. For she could not bear to listen to him weeping. Simply stared out of the cavern’s mouth, stroking his broad neck as he wept into her chest, trembling as he asked her again and again ‘why.’
She did not answer. And she did not listen. But she remained by his side, for the dark act she’d forced upon him had bound them together.
Forever.