i'm to be left alone, she told her staff before she entered the haven, but her eyes held within them a maelstrom, her figure a battlefield of windswept plains and hurricanes. there may have been others they've turned away, but him?

the humming in the back of her head is a calling keen that has only grown louder with each passing night that she staves off the inevitable, prideful and willful ignorance carrying her through the sleepless nights, the primordial hunger, the itching of her skin. 

she gathers herself to standing. lyune stays curled, one eye cracked open to stare at the intruder. lightning cracks behind him, lighting his silhouette at the mouth of the cave, and the beds of her nails itch once more.

"have i not earned a moment of respite?" she seethes. "whatever my attendants may have said, i am fine."

lyune startles her with a snarl and a cross thump of his thick tail against the cave wall. she runs her tongue along her teeth and considers her draconid kin. 

bitterly, she admits: "i am rayquaza's new chosen."

Roy Aker

☉

freya flinches and then consequently bristles, lips curling to show her teeth. anger snakes through her, hot and red. how dare he pretend to know her. how dare he think he understand any of this. any of what it means. 

i was almost happy. 

"you think this is freedom?" she says. the rain comes down harder and each strike of lightning in the sky is a footfall bringing her closer to her kin.

she sucks in a breath and tries to choke it down, but it comes out in a downpour. 

"was it the world that was offered to me when tapu fini outstretched her hand? when i scorned her and she retaliated with violence? half a dozen dragons dead in the water and why? because i dared defy a god's gift.

"avatarship. i have seen the way it warps the soul. i have witnessed the way it breaks you, and i - i cannot break. not now. not with so much at stake." her words warble at the end, fire extinguished by the monsoon. 

Roy Aker

☉

you were meant for it.

half-lidded emerald eyes had looked upon her, lips blue from the cold, and she had said, i'm glad it's you. it's your birthright. but that same woman, whom their god had abandoned, was wearing an open wound, dripping blood from the bits of her soul that had been torn away in the process. 

she remembers herself as she was, a piteous, starving thing, lusting after a higher power if only to not feel so infinitesimal. it is a spectre she cannot shake, a past she is so adamantly fearful might be her future, might yet become her present. 

stubborn pride makes her want to throw up more defenses in front of his insistence. they're too alike in that way. too combustible. why? he asks and she thinks because i am not strong enough to do this alone.

more thunder. the rain hardens. stinging nettles of hail clatter outside the mouth of the cave and she grimaces, trying to steel herself as lyune hauls himself to all fours. his large head pushes against her back and she stumbles forward, closer to her cousin.

i don't have to do it alone. she told cygne, while the tide pools swirled around them - we're not dragons. the first thing we do when we're born? we cry. we ask for help. that's strength, i think. knowing when to ask. knowing that you should. admittedly, i'm...quite bad at it.*

her teeth grit. she stretches her jaw. "i can't face them alone. come with me. now."

Roy Aker

☉

"through the storm," she says cryptically and lyune lowers his head. freya pitches her heel against his hard scales and hauls herself up his neck. her hand stretches back down, mouth set in a firm line, anticipation roiling in her belly.

it was inevitable. she had always known it was inevitable.

but now it feels possible, probable, with her kol here. whether he joins her on lyune or soars beside her on balmung, they explode with purpose out from the side of the dome, up into the sky, where lightning arcs and hail rains down upon them.

lyune's wings, whole and healthy, beat towards the west, taking them over land and sea, where pressure mounts and the soul is drawn. a pillar, wreathed in fog, beckons them home.

sky pillar.

Roy Aker

☉

and in the hail, she sees another self, spiraling alongside the man and his charizard, laughter between them as they chase a golden-haired woman with eyes as green as her patron's scales. balmung's tail burns brightly and she blinks water from her eyes, looking forward, finding only an empty space where eva ought to be. 

the hail becomes wet sleet, slanting to the side, and lyune tucks his wings, warded away from the top of the spire and towards an opening at its middle. his claws scrape against ancient stone. after freya dismounts, he shakes the wetness from his wings, folding them neatly against his back.

thunder peals, joining a roar deep enough to shake her to the bone. she stares upward, grasping the rail, ghosting her hands across the grooves their ancestors have left in their wake.

"they're waiting above. roy," she says, and her eyes glow dimly in the light, "do you feel it?

"wer docar persvek wer seoyl."

Roy Aker

☉

as that slithering language falls past her wet lips, another roar is met in kind. she takes a step and hears the echoes of thousands of others matching her stride - sneakers, greaves, moccasins, bare skin, and in her ears are reverent prayers, tinted gold.

you have been alive since the dawn of what we remember. another floor, a breeze at her heels, her hair spun over her shoulders, pulled by the wind. you have taken my memories. a snarl, a shaking of the very foundations of this sacred place. no, not taken. safeguarded. breathed upon me a vast expanse of nothingness.

i am no longer too small to contain myself.

her sclera darkens to pitch and her last step is a stumble out into the open, hand searching for purchase on the one person left to share her name.




the rain stops all at once. the fog thins and through the billowing white radiate golden rings. she holds fast and she whispers, "si mi thric drongilt tesantamaso." purple fire races towards the two draconids, skittering over the ground, burning the last wisps of mist that stand between them.

rayquaza arches their neck down, humming lowly and far beneath the spire, violent waves crash against the shore. they wait for her, head bowed. her eyes are that of the dragon's when she looks upon her cousin, and when she crosses the distance she feels those echoes again, palm pressing with the chorus of the hundreds of years before her, and the hundreds of years that will come after.

and it is not of her own volition that her mouth contorts, that the rough scrape of the ancient tongue worms its way up her throat. rayquaza's maw parts and past her teeth tumble a centuries'-old voice - 

"hesi seoyl ui ir."

Roy Aker

☉