Meri just about burst out crying, throwing her arms around him. “I’m so sorry! This is all my fault! If I’da stayed out of the woods…” And, well, she was kinda right. If this day was like dominoes, then yeah, in a cosmic sense she had caused all this. And part of him did wanna blame her, make it all easy by hating someone within reach. But honestly… listening to her sobbing, and having spent the whole day with her…
Well, he just had to buck up and be an adult, no matter how much he wanted to go crawl in a hole. “We already had this talk.” He returned her hug. “You weren’t the one shooting lightning around during a drought, right?”
“N-no, but..”
“And I don’t think you set off a flash grenade in the middle of the Deepshadow, either.” He said it lightly, but it made him start to wonder if he was the one responsible for all this. The thought made his guts churn even more. Still, he’d done what he had to, and he also wasn’t the one frying trees.
“But I started it all by flying a broom headfirst into the Deepshadow, like a, like a moron!”
“Sis…” Valencia scooped up Meri, hugging her close. “Come on, you’re eleven. Makin’ mistakes is part of the territory. Heck, I came home with a black eye every other week for a while.” Timothy tried to imagine what could actually hurt the hulking dragoness, and drew a blank. “And th’ shorty’s right, it ain’t like you knew this would happen.”
Meri sniffled. “…I still feel awful, though."
"All you can do is learn from it and do better." Timothy said. A sentiment that was directed his way, too. "As long as you're still alive, you can keep fighting." He still felt miserable, though.
Merida sniffled, looking from her sister’s faint smile to Timothy’s clearly taped on one. And she whispered something in V’s ear. The surprised dragoness let her sister down a moment later, and Meri hugged Timothy again.
“You probably need a hug, too.”
It really hurt, with her scales poking his thin, raw skin. But the feeling of being held was the last push that sent him over the edge into tears of his own. Turned out he could toughen to lots of awful, but a hug would cut right through his armor. It had been a long time since he’d let himself cry, really cry. But now he couldn’t stop, and it was ugly and inelegant and made him feel weaker than before. Meri seemed surprised at the sudden intensity of his tears, but set her jaw and held him all the tighter. There was something soothing about being held while he cried, even if it was a little kid he ought to be shielding from it. As for the other two, Mat and Valencia respectfully looked away. Valencia looked particularly awkward.
Timothy cried for a long while. But every creek dries eventually, and eventually the witch managed to quiet down, hiccuping and feeling like a very wrung and embarrassed sponge. ”I’m s-sorry.” Was the first coherent thing he managed. “You shouldn’t h-have to see that. An’ to cry on a kid’s shoulder…”
“Yeah, it kinda kills the ‘Lusundrite bad boy’ thing you got going.” V said.
“V!” Mat and Meri both scolded, with Meri sounding particularly angry. “He already told me he ain’t with’em!”
“Hey, he has the brand.” The older dragoness pointed out sullenly. “I covered for him to Locke, but that needs explaining.” Meri still looked furious.
“It’s okay, Meri.” Timothy said softly.
“It’s not!”
“Look… Valencia?” Timothy looked her straight in the eyes, and tried to will himself to stop sounding like he’d just cried. “Y-You ain’t got a reason to trust me yet, really. But I want you t’know that I ain’t like those wastelanders. I didn’t get this brand by choice. I ain’t ever even met another dragon, and it’d be a heckuva trick to be a kindre dragon supremacist.”
By now Valencia was looking very pink in the face. “I was kidding!”
“Well, I ain’t. I need you to know that I ain’t some with those lunatics.” He said it grimly. “I was raised Vol Streneli, by my mom and grandma.”
“Wait, how’d a kid with the brand live in Strenel!?”
“I didn’t have it, then. I was clean when my mom adopted me, and for eleven years I was just a normal Vol puppy.” He had some fond memories of that time. “I lived in the village n’all. Communal everything. The whole Vol experience, y’see. Didn’t last, though.”
Timothy’s face darkened. “When I was eleven, I got into a scrap with another kid. He’d been pushing me around awhile, and Vol kids brawl. It’s normal there. Then he insulted my mom for adopting me, and I saw red. And… something happened. My forehead exploded with pain, and I couldn’t see anything. There was this harsh, white light. I saw him go from smug and snarling to terrified, and then fire spilled from my hands, my mouth, my everything. I didn’t know any fire magic before then.”
“Holy crap.”
“Everything was on fire, including me. But I wasn’t burning. I passed out from the smoke, and when I came to…”
———
His whole body was in pain when he awoke.
First, his mother had hugged him. She was a tall, strong she-wolf, a blacksmith, with arms scarred in places from the forge. Her eyes were gray like a stormy day; and it fit her stoic, stern demeanor. She was serious and quiet, but he knew she loved him, and he loved her dearly. After all, they’d chosen each other. She had never been a hugger, though, and Timothy felt anxiety build at this.
His grandmother, for once, wasn’t grinning. The old vixen had always been a wily, tricky teacher, inviting him to question everything about the world around him. She had taught him magic with her wild fingers, had shown him book after book, and had taught him stuff she said was “more important than magic.” Logic, ‘lateral thinking,’ creativity. But from the moment he’d been able to toddle, he couldn’t remember any time she’d looked so grim and joyless, and… and old. And so, so tired. Kind of like he felt, all of a sudden.
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“What… what happened?” Timothy’s voice came out hoarse. Like the wolves who’d spent years sucking on smoke pipes.
“Something we’d hoped would never happen.” Granny said. “A curse has been awakened in you.”
“What?” Timothy asked. “What do you mean?”
“They found you and Goran’s boy in the west cornfield.” His grandmother shook her head. “The fire took out the entire thing. The boy’s only alive because Ettie was fast. But you… they found you in the worst of the flames, completely untouched.”
“What? B-but, I don’t know any fire magic!” Timothy protested. But even as he did, he remembered: anger, pain, then fire. It’d felt like his blood was being drained out of him. His chest had hurt like his heart’d exploded. Now, his blood ran cold, and his forehead hurt, and, and… Timothy began to tremble against his mother’s chest. “I… I didn’t mean to…”
“I know.” His mother spoke up for the first time, in a soft, even voice. “But it happened. And now we have choices to make, and you must know things.”
Timothy swallowed hard. “L-like what?”
“You know I’ve told you that I adopted you.” His mom said, in a soft, even tone. When he nodded, she continued. “The truth is, I know who your birth parents are.”
Timothy looked up in disbelief. “You do!?”
“Yes.” She said, like it was obvious. “Neither of them were worthy of parenthood. Both were cowards, both made poor decisions, and in the end, they put themselves before you.”
Timothy thought that one over. “But you stepped in.”
Mom nodded. “I couldn’t sit by and let an innocent child suffer for poor parents. Make no mistake— you are my son, and I wouldn’t give you up for anything.”
“Even now?”
“Of course.” And she said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. It made the boy feel a little better. “Unfortunately, what you are now suffering is something of your father. His father—“
“I have a grandpa?”
“Not anymore, sonny.” Granny shook her head. “Who he was isn’t important, anyway. What is important is that he was there when The Dark Dragon was slain.”
Timothy gaped. He’d been told stories of the war, and he knew all about the death of Lusundra. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything, my boy.” She shook her head. “When Lusundra killed himself, he turned his body, spirit, and most of all, his hatred, into a terrible weapon. He tore apart the land, filled the sky with poison, and cursed all that was with one break in the world.” The wolf had heard stories of the Shattering, but never from one who’d been there. He shuddered. “The true extent of his damage is so deep, it’s never fully been understood. But… in my time as a crone, I have made inquiries. Done what research I could in these hard times. And it seems… the invading armies were tainted.” The air seemed to grow colder at that last word. “Not just their bodies, but their very spirits.”
“Their spirits…?”
And the old woman sighed, her shoulders slumped. “Deep within my own spirit, around my womb, is a twisted, hateful fragment. A remnant of Lusundra’s own spirit and will, buried so deep I could only find it with the most powerful rituals I knew… and even that soon slipped away from me, with age. It is silent, invisible, does nothing. I only thought to look because I was there, with Lunacy Corps.”
Timothy just stared. Grandma never talked about the war. And— she had Lusundra in her!?
“But there was never enough time, or power, or support to investigate it properly. I tried!” And she was shouting. “I tried, I told those in power, but they refused to listen to me, declared me a mad crone, rather than see what could be a terrifying truth. I was once the Great Sage who Lifted the Mountains… but now, I am just old, child. I was old when you were born, and long before. My skills have long since passed. I was no match for a spell twisted into being by the Dark Dragon.
The child put it all together and gasped in terror. “So he’s still alive in us!?”
“No.” His mother’s voice struck like her hammer. “He’s dead, and nothing can change death.”
“But then…”
Grandma stooped down before him, and took his hands in hers. Hers were shaking, even more than his, and felt so brittle. “I believe that you inherited a fragment of Lusundra’s spirit. I could not check, but that fragment must have been passed down to your father, harmlessly, and then to you. And… it altered you, in ways I couldn’t detect, since perhaps you were in the womb. I could never tell. I am so old… the spell too subtle, and it doesn’t live in you where it lived in me. I thought you were safe. But I was wrong. So very wrong. And all this old crone can offer is her sorrow.” The witch reached into her robes, and took out a mirror. Slowly, she lifted it to Timothy’s face.
A choked gasp left his throat, and his mother held him tighter. Because the eyes that met him were blood-red. And on his forehead burned a symbol… Lusundra’s own eclipse. As he watched, it began to burn a harsh white.
“The curse wasn’t meant to kill us, I see it now. It was meant to pass down, when children were born, and… change them. I suspect it has been working since you were very young… you’ve always had a very high appetite, and never feared the dark, like other children. You are half-dragon, Timothy, and Marked of clan Lusundra.” Johanna said softly.
———
“What!? You’re trying to tell us that Lusundra cursed— like, the entirety of the Streneli? That’s impossible!” Valencia looked shocked.
“The Death Curse of a powerful magician can cut unfathomably deep, and this wasn’t just some mortal wannabe. This was the Tyrant.”
“But- but wouldn’t everyone know? You just said everyone there was cursed!”
Timothy shook his head. “The curse was, and is, really subtle. The mind of one of the world’s greatest and most twisted mages, in a moment of pure hatred for… existence itself? Would you really want to bet he couldn’t do it?” Her silence spoke volumes. By then, Mat was holding a frightened Meri. “And after the war, there were few gifted magicians left in Strenel. They don’t exactly make a lot of them, an’ a lot of them bit it in the battles with the Bloodmoon Witches. And when Grandma found it… Even the few people she trusted wouldn’t believe her, and shunned her for even suggesting it.”
“But… if babies were being born funny…” Meri said with her eyes wide.
Timothy swallowed on a dry mouth. “I showed the curse late. I think… that made me one of the lucky ones. My grandma said…”
———
Grandma sighed. “I suspect… though I do not know, as my connections and resources have long decayed, that the curse is widespread among the Vol, fainter among the other Streneli, and only seldom among the peoples of other races. Our people, and those of Tyriandes, were the greatest enemies of Lusundra. It was our heroes who led the invasion, who stopped the Bloodmoon Witches, who destroyed the Impaled Workshop. In his wrath, his last impulse was to get revenge upon us by utilizing his greatest talents; his skill with biomancy and the spirit. He knew that ours are a prideful people… an many of ours would kill their own children for showing half-breed signs.” she looked mournfully on his distraught face, “Many would never admit to something draconic in their bloodline, whatever they had to do to hide it. A curse designed to hit our people’s great weaknesses, through our own blood.”
“We never thought the curse had passed to you. I wanted to believe you were safe. Oh, my son…” And his heart hurt at the forlorn voice of his mom.
His mind filled with noise, drowning out even the simplest thoughts. He could only sit there as his mother hurried to pack, and his grandmother explained that they needed to run, that very night, and there was no time for goodbyes. That all of Two Rivers wanted him dead. That from that moment on, they only had one goal— escape to Berrygrove. His mother couldn’t stop gathering their little food to comfort him, though he could tell she longed to. Even his grandma left him, to cast what few enchantments she could manage to try to keep them safe.
They’d only gotten this much of a reprieve because his mother had promised to kill him before he woke. That made the noise even louder. Then the windows crashed in, and torches followed, and the noise was drowned out by the cries of angry men and women.