There wasn’t any reason for Sheilah’s belief, no way to justify it to herself, but for some reason the sky seemed lower than at the Dragon Terrace, somehow.
At the Terrace, despite being the highest point in the Redstone, the sky was limitless, stretching out endlessly, and yet impossibly high and unreachable. Maybe it was the dragonblood that sizzled in her veins, but it inspired an intense yearning for something unreachable.
Somehow, inexplicably, the sky here felt like it was just within reach. Just a little bit out of reach. So close.
Was it part of the gift that her draconic ancestors had passed on to her? Sheilah wondered.
A great many things within her had changed since her night with Adlan.
She herself had changed.
Her parents had attributed it to the shocking things they’d revealed to her- and to some extent that was true- but the greater changes had come from within.
“He wouldn’t understand.” Sheilah muttered to herself as she stared up at the sky that seemed to be just barely out of reach. “But then again, who would?” She asked, but internally, she knew Adlan would.
She wished again that Adlan had been her father; he would have been so much easier to speak with about so many things.
He understood the Dragon so much better than even Davian. There was so much more to the Dragon than simply Supremacy, Immortality, Calamity, and Indomitability.
Part of her demanded that she keep an eye on her surroundings as she sat, perched on her boulder, but there was another part of her that simply didn’t need to.
Sheilah sat on top of a boulder, her bow in her lap, with an arrow nocked and ready to draw, while her dangling feet beat against the stone rhythmically. Her long black hair shifted with the wind, her blue eyes studious. She waited and watched while the ancient runestone loomed behind her.
When she’d first arrived here after leaving the Redstone, she’d inspected the weathered plinth curiously, picking out the sigils of all the clans she recognized.
There were a number of sigils that she didn’t know, and she suspected that aside from these markings, they were probably forgotten to time.
Who were they?
Which Totem did they give their allegiance to? What songs and stories did they tell amongst themselves as they prepared for their hunts? Who were their heroes?
She wondered if Davian even knew.
His speech didn’t do her any favors. How many clans would be lost over the centuries? Who would sing their songs?
She looked back at her tiny camp, wedged between the boulder she sat on and that ancient, carved spire. It was a meager thing, nothing more than a bedroll, her pack, and the embers of her campfire. Everything else, she wore.
She turned back to the rich deep forest that marched up to the stone and refocused her attention.
Eventually she’d spot something that she could eat.
While she waited, she carved her symbol into the boulder she sat on with her finger, a sign that she at least had been there, that she lived and breathed and sung the songs of her people. How long would it last? Would anyone see it and know it for what it was?
Anyone from the Dragon Clan would instantly be able to recognize the mark with her fingertip. There was the sigil for the Tyrant, of course. Most people thought of it as the Dragon, but the Dragon Clan knew it for what it was, the sigil of the Tyrant, bold and fearless, glaring down imperiously upon all She saw. Below the Tyrant was the mark of the main bloodline, the First Hero who no longer had a name, the one who had eaten the flesh of the dragons and taught his people to do the same. That was her family mark. Her personal sigil was directly below it; a swirling series of comma-like talon marks in a pattern. Anyone from the Clans would recognize it as being from the Dragon Clan, from the First Bloodline.
There were places in the Burning Lands that she’d marked with her personal mark. Hopefully they survived the test of time. Maybe someone would see them a century from now and know that someone from the Dragon Clan had been there, just like they were.
An animal she didn’t recognize, but was close enough to the deer she’d hunted with her father in the Timberwolf Clan stepped out from between the trees. Sheilah went as still as the stone she sat on and watched.
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It was variegated brown, with glittering antlers and hooves and dark eyes that seemed to see everything.
She’d tried to take a shot at one before, but she hadn’t even began to nock her arrow before it bolted in weird elongated leaps, shadowy afterimages scattering in other directions. She wouldn’t make that mistake today.
It stepped away from the tree it had appeared from, moving with delicate, careful steps, ears probing for the slightest noise in every direction as it nibbled at the ground.
She gently shifted the bow towards the deer, already planning how she would draw and release, replaying the movements in her mind over and over again. This is how she would do it. She willed the animal to move out of cover just a little further so she would get a clean shot.
Part of hunting was patience. Sometimes you could get a clean kill quickly, without forethought, but sometimes- most times, really- you had to play the waiting game.
It lifted its head, and for a moment she had a perfect, clean shot. She took it, raising her bow smoothly while drawing the arrow so that the fletching tickled her cheek, then immediately loosing her fearful bolt.
Her arrow flew so quick it was difficult to track it in flight, punching through the neck of the deer right below its head, tearing it clean off.
She dropped from the boulder and shouldered her bow as she headed towards her meal, drawing the knife at her waist.
As she approached the headless deer, still spasming and kicking as if to deny that it was dead, she spotted some mist wrapping some trees nearby. It was much too warm for fog and mist, but she knew what it was, anyway. There were things in the forest that wanted to make a meal of her.
She plucked her arrow from the dirt, struggling to pull it loose from the rich, dark soil, tucking the arrow back into her quiver, unwound a rope she’d wrapped around her waist, tied it around her prey, picked up its head, and headed back to the sigil stone.
She dressed her kill quickly at the edge of the forest, trying to be more alert than her prey had been. There were predators of some kind in that fog that drifted through the trees, predators that used it to their advantage, blinding those who wandered into it. She’d seen it happen from her perch.
She stripped the hide off of the deer, hauled out the guts, and dismantled the carcass in the same way that she’d been taught to handle the goats that had been selected for their meat.
The meat she intended to keep was sliced up and placed on the still-wet hide and rolled up; the rest went onto a slab of rock for the scavengers.
She examined the head of the deer curiously; the antlers were seemingly crystal, black and glossy, tiny flecks glittering in the depths.
She hung the head from the antlers at her belt; something to examine later. She was on a timeline right now; the patches of fog were gathering, approaching, milling about in the forest. She couldn’t see what was in the mist, only that it was there.
Once everything she didn’t need was piled up, she used puffs of dragonfire to heat up nearby rocks, gathered up her hide with the deer steaks, and retreated back to her campsite.
She staked out her deer steaks over her small campfire, eyes up in search of predators or scavengers looking for an easy meal, and while they cooked, she tossed the deer head onto the hide.
Once she stripped the flesh from the skull and removed the brain; she could mash up the brains and grind it into the hide.
The joke went, “an animal had just enough brains to preserve its hide”, but really it was something of a lesson, a learning tool: when brains were ground into the hide during the curing process, it would turn into supple leather, just the same as any other beast she’d hunted in the Redstone. But that was for later.
She reclaimed her perch atop the boulder and waited.
As one of the patches of fog entered the area she’d put the deers innards, the heat from the stones- or perhaps just being in the sun itself- melted away to reveal something similar to the timberwolves that lived in the Redstone, but much larger.
The wolf- if it was a wolf- was big enough to ride, with a thick pelt and snowy-white fur.
“Ah, so that’s who’s been bothering me.” She exclaimed quietly as it bent to the messy pile and began to eat, massive jaws shearing through bone easily, tongue lapping up blood, gulping slithering organs quickly.
She raised her bow.
“Hello and goodbye.” She greeted, and loosed. The wolf dropped immediately, and she raced down to add a wolf pelt to her collection.
Sheilah took her time cleaning off the knife she’d used for her kills. Davian had said that it’d been made from a piece of Adlan’s weapon, but with knives there was no real provenance or value except that it belonged to the family. It was just a flake of a tooth hafted in a scrap of leftover bone, the grip bound in scraps of dragon leather.
But for her, it was something more. She’d killed a dragon with it. Adlan had confirmed it; it was an extremely young dragon, but it was a dragon nonetheless, having passed whatever mysteries of transformation from dragonling to dragon.
It bothered her sometimes, she’d taken in the flesh and blood from both a dragon and a Tyrant Dragon, and historically speaking those that took in more than one became something more dragon than human.
She sheathed the knife and set it aside, and went to work on the deerhide, occasionally taking bites of freshly cooked meat as she worked, part of her mind focused on her task, another part of her mind worrying about whether she would lose her humanity, a third part of her mind spreading her awareness as wide as it could go, wary of predators and intruders.
Each part of her mind was vaguely aware of the others, though none of them were aware that this degree of partitioning was itself evidence of her transformation into something else.
Those that could have warned her were centuries dead, and those that could have safeguarded her against it were in the Redstone.
But she had left the Redstone, and was alone.