“I can’t breathe.”
“Yes you can.”
“It burns.” He’s crying. Pale eyes full of tears as he clutches at his chest.
“It’s your mind setting you up for failure.”
“I’m going to die.”
“No, you aren’t.”
Max sits at my feet, out of reach and curious.
Illarian’s corpse continues to clutch at his chest. His bloody eagle wings set back in their proper place.
His ribs remained broken, snapped in half. His corpse is all kinds of misshapen. His wings were still clipped, the demon resting on his shoulder forever banished.
“I’m going to burn to death.”
“We already have.”
The corpse is unseeing and unhearing. Eyes wide with fright as he keeps clutching at his chest.
It’s a mockery.
My new prison was a mockery.
I detest it.
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Max hates Illarian.
It’s like he knows something is wrong with the corpse.
I can’t hate Illarian. It’d be monstrous if I did.
I’d be the worst.
After all, Illarian ended up like this because of me.
Because I was too blind to see.
I made my own prison, with poison leaking from the folds.
Max doesn’t understand that.
He doesn’t need to, as long as I understand.
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“I want to show you something.” The angel had told me.
He had raised his hand and I took it.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I saw the queens and kings, sitting beyond the gate.
I saw how they feared the unknown. The shimmering horror of our gate over the horizon.
People react rashly when they fear.
I saw destruction and death.
I saw armies rallied.
The gate burned, crumbled and they evaded.
Knights sworn to bravery would find themselves in dragon nests. Newborn drakes will cry out, teeth not even grown.
Steaming blood will spill and rock will melt.
A mother’s fury would rip the world asunder.
We will die.
“But not if they die first.”
“That’s something else entirely.”
“Not if you understand.”
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The gate stands tall before us. As is our punishment, we were exiled to the outskirts so that we could see our failure every morning and every night.
There’s a cabin at the footsteps of the giant wall.
Abandoned, rotten and falling apart.
A roof over our head though.
I can’t leave without sentencing Illarian’s corpse to rot.
I’m too weak to move the both of us and he’s too weak to breathe without me.
Max finds the rotting holes in the walls and claims them as his own makeshift prison. My own prison is one of fresh air and dying skin.
Illarian doesn’t know that though.
He doesn’t know much of anything anymore.
“We’ll be the first to see the world burn.”
Max is the only one that answers with a twitch of the ear. Illarian is too busy trying to understand breathing.
He used to understand everything.
They broke him. They clipped his wings and broke his mind just as they dipped my mind into poison.
“Isn’t that ironic? We try to save them and they break us.”
Illarian is still staring with his wide pale eyes.
Claws dig into his dark flesh and blood trickles down onto the floor.
This wasn’t what Silvestr imagined, I’m sure. Silvestr always lacked an imagination.
When they sentenced us he probably imagined the shop, but instead of a small mortal boy sweeping the floor there was a broken angel.
He probably thought I’d still be selling fortunes as he sat in the shining light of the underworld, worshipped as the one who saved them all.
It’s wrong of me to blame only Silvestr. I know that.
He was simply the one who stood in my way.
“I’d say we’d get our revenge, but they destroyed us a bit too much for that didn’t they?”
Max darts off into the shadows. Illarian still stands there, bleeding and forgetting to breathe.
It must be hard, to breathe for so long without lungs and then to suddenly find yourself with them again. I can only imagine the horrors he went through.
It’s why I can’t blame his corpse. It would be unfair.
I simply sat in an iron cage whilst he was dangled on the cusp of death. His lungs replaced his wings, the demon stripped from his very bones and skin flayed open to show the truth.
It’s why they struck the bargain to begin with.
There was nothing left to gain by keeping him.
Silvestr never lied.
He simply withheld the truth.
“They were smarter than we were.”
The words are toxic to say.
My ears are the only ones to hear them.
“I hope we all burn.”
There were still dragons left after all.