Ashbel

The humans are scared that Clem is going to eat the moon.

In attempt to save the moon they bang pots together, thinking the noise will scare him off. They do this every time there’s a lunar eclipse. The humans need something to blame the moon’s disappearance on. Dragons—especially Clem—are their most beloved scapegoat.

If they only knew that spiders frighten Clem more than pots ever could.

I bank upwind to avoid burning ash. It's falling just as quickly as the snow. The tip of my left wing nearly brushes a man’s half-burnt body hanging from the top of a burning evergreen. I spare him a glance.

“Your work?” I growl to Arden.

Arden dives so she’s flying to my left, her giggle shockingly loud in the forest’s quiet. Her scales, the color of the sky at dusk, blend with the ash. Golden eyes meet mine as she replies, “Always, Everett.”

Clem, flying to my right, huffs softly. “I wish you would just burn them to their bones.”

“Hanging them makes more of a point.”

“But the smell.”

He’s right. Nothing reeks quite like a human’s burning flesh. But I can do something about that.

I spread both my wings at once, lean back into the wind, turn, aim at the body and breathe. Ice flows from my lungs and wraps around the human like a candy coating. I poke it with a single talon.

Arden whistles with approval as the body falls to the forest floor piece by icy piece.

We’ve been at war with the humans for nearly a century now. It started when they figured out that dragon blood can get humans really, really high. It releases a chemical in their brains that tricks them into thinking their most desired wishes have come true. Dragons can’t get high on our own blood but I wish I could know what the high that was worth slaughtering half of us for before we decided to start hunting back feels like. Even when we did, and their brother and fathers started to swing, swing, swing from trees, they refused to stop.

Which is fine by me.

When the humans first came, I was a pup. My parents were among the first to have their blood drained. Back then, I didn’t even have my wings yet.

Now, I do.

Now, I know how to kill.

Now, I know how to freeze.

And I am very, very good at what I do.

“Um, guys?” Clem cocks his head. He looks like a tiger gifted wings, with orange and black scales and violent violet eyes. He is by far the kindest of us but also one of the most feared, enough so that the humans write folktales of him swallowing celestial bodies. Probably because two years ago when his brother was caught Clem uprooted an entire town with a few breaths. Arden breathes fire. I breathe ice. But it’s the dragons like Clem, the ones that can breathe wind, that can control the very air around us, that are the most lethal.

“Guys,” Clem repeats, “do you hear that?”

“No,” Arden and I say as one.

“Listen.”

We fall silent. A moment later, I hear it.

Something in the forest is crying.

Arden’s golden eyes widen. “That sounds like—”

“A human child,” I answer. It’s difficult to grin when I’m in dragon form but I’m pretty sure I feel it spread across my face anyway. “Let’s go.”

We follow the sound of the cry. Arden is the smallest of us but also the fastest. She disappears in the trees ahead of Clem and I. Although we're not supposed to fly alone, I'm not worried. Arden can take care of herself, we all know this forest like we know one another, and a human’s cry is like a siren’s call for dragons—too tempting to refuse. I don’t doubt we’ll end up at the same place.

The cry grows louder and louder until it is directly below us. Clem and I dive, pulling our wings in close to our bodies to avoid getting scratched by branches.

Arden is crouched in a valley, paws buried in a thick pile of snow and ash. Before her, sitting on a blanket, is a toddler. She’s stopped crying. Her eyes are the same color as the evergreens towering over her, her curls the same shade as the flames dancing on their branches, and her skin paler than the snow. A silver necklace with a violin charm hangs from her neck.

Clem and I land on either side of Arden, flanking her protectively.

Arden nods to us once. Then she opens her mouth, setting her slithering tongue free, and breathes. I watch as her red fire engulfs the toddler and wait for that familiar smell to overtake the pine.

But when the flames stop the toddler is sitting in the same place in the snow, twirling a single red curl around a fat finger. The only thing turned to ash is the blanket.

For a few long moments we are so quiet I swear I can hear each snowflake hit the forest floor.

Clem turns to Arden. “Arden, what the hell?”

She snaps, “You’re mad at me?”

“Well, it didn't work.”

“You try then, Clem.”

Clem opens his mouth. Breathes. The quickest way for Clem to kill is by breathing so much air that it’s impossible for his victim to get in a breath. I’ve seen him do it thousands of times. It normally doesn’t take more than a second or two.

But Clem breathes, and breathes, and breathes.

And when he is done the toddler is still sitting there, twirling her hair.

“Move,” I snarl, stepping in front of them.

I have frozen acres and acres solid. I have stopped armies in their tracks. I have killed entire ecosystems.

But after I breathe, hard, harder than I ever have to kill one pesky human, she is still sitting there, twirling that goddamn curl.

My tail flicks. “How?”

“I’ve heard about this,” Clem says quietly. “I thought it only happened if a dragon and a human….” He trails off. It takes me a second to understand.

“Okay,” Arden sighs, “who was dumb enough to have sex with a human?”

Clem clicks his tongue. “My bet’s on Garter.”

I gape at him. “That’s seriously what’s going on?”

“It’s the only explanation I’ve ever heard of,” he answers. Arden and I exchange a glance. Clem’s been alive for three centuries. If that’s the only explanation he can give…..

I take a step closer to the toddler. Another. Another. Carefully.

Simultaneously, Arden lifts off the ground, flaps her wings twice, and carries her body backward a few feet. “Don’t touch it, Ev! That's the most dangerous species alive! And it could be a trap.”

I ignore her. I watch the toddler closely with each step, looking for something. I’m not sure what. An explanation, I think.

Or maybe an excuse.

Her eyes are the same color as the trees. Trees talk, you know. They’re the ones that told the humans that blood is more precious than gold. I search her eyes like I have for so many years searched the trees, looking for a secret, for a hint of something reptilian, something that makes her anything like me and less like them. She raises her head, the curl falling from her finger.

Smiles.

“I could just step on her,” I offer.

Clem flies forward to land beside me. There’s less than five feet between us and the toddler now. “No, you can’t. We have to take her back home.”

“But no one’s going to claim her,” Arden protests. “Everyone knows it’s forbidden.”

“We have to ask Rha what to do.”

I shake my massive head, sending snow atop it flying. Some lands in the toddler’s lap. “Screw Rha.”

“Everett.”

There are not many that I will take orders from. Rha is one of them. Clem, unfortunately, is the other.

“Rha will tell us what to do.” Clem’s voice is soft. He knows how hard this is for me. For all of us. Leaving one of them alive. Watching one of them smile. Giving one of them enough of a chance to. “I’ll carry her.”

I don’t why, but something in me makes me protest. “No. I will.”

*****

With the toddler in my talons, I resist the urge to drop her, to watch her skull crack against the earth. Clem is flying downwind from me. I think he knows as well as I do that I just might accidentally let her slip.

We fly north over the forest until the terrain beneath us turns rocky and I can smell the ocean. We used to live in the forest, but when the war started, the mountains close to the sea became safer. Humans may be able to fly in their plastic machines but it’s a hell of a lot harder for them to reach us here than on the ground.

The familiar bend of the cliffs looms closer. Soon, I can make out dragons diving from the cliffs into the sea, hunting for everything from fish to dolphins to sharks. We fly over them, not wanting to disrupt the hunt. They screech when they see the thing in my talons.

“Everett!”

“The hell are you doing with that?”

“Drop it into the sea!”

“Ignore them,” Clem insists, just as Lima, a young ice-breather, flies out of the ocean with half a seal’s body in her mouth. She soars, saltwater flying off her wings, directly into our path.

I bank to avoid getting hit by her. We face one another. In dragon form, she looks like she could be my sister, with bone white scales and crystal blue eyes. We can’t fly in the same place. Instead, we drop about twenty feet, then rise. Drop, rise, drop, rise. Lima matches my beat as her friends, two fire-breathers, flank her. Clem and Arden do the same for me.

“What do you want, Lima?” Arden growls. She doesn’t tend to like ice-breathers in general. She often says I’m the only exception because I’m meaner than most fire-breathers. Which, from Arden, is a compliment.

In response, Lima spits the seal body out onto the field at the top of the cliff. The toddler squirms, burying her face against the smooth curve of my talon.

“You’re traitors,” she hisses once her mouth is clear.

“I trained you,” I growl back. “You really think I would protect one of them?”

“You’re carrying one.”

“But only because—” Clem starts. It’s too late. Lima breathes.

I can’t really blame her. I’d want to kill any dragon that came back carrying a human still alive too.

Arden’s faster than I am. Her fire meets Lima’s ice before it can reach me, sizzling and melting, freezing and burning. The flames slowly start to creep forward, pushing the ice back.

Lima’s friends open their mouths. Before the first flicker of a flame can escape Clem breathes a rush of air their way, extinguishing them like a single huff does a candle.

“Go!” Clem yells to me. “Go, we got this.”

Running from a fight goes against every bone in my body. But because it is Clem, and because I know that he is right, I dive. I pull up just before we hit the ocean, close enough that the toddler’s toes graze the saltwater. Just as they do I lean into the wind, pump my wings to regain my balance in the air current, and fly into the single opening at the bottom of the cliff.

At high tide, you can’t even get into this cave.

It’s the safest place for a Dragon King. For Rha.

I fly through the darkness of the cliff, my body straight as an arrow. The toddler starts to cry again, the sound reverberating off the narrow walls. The opening is like one long hallway, stretching for a quarter of a mile, leading to the cave’s center.

It would be pitch black if not for the bioluminescent fireflies that call it their home. They set the place aglow, different shades of neon violet, cyan, and lemon. In the center of the cave, lounging on a sleek rock shimmering with resting fireflies, is Rha.

Rha is the cool blue of a shallow sea with silver tipped scales and giant, curved amber horns. This is not the first time I’ve been before our king but it is the first in years. No one goes into this cave unless they have a good reason to. Rha was the first of us. Rha made all of us. If a single human saw one of us flying into this cave, if they figured out why….

It’s just not worth the risk.

Until it is.

I land before Rha gently and place the toddler not nearly as gently on the ground before him.

He lifts his heavy head. Blinks once at the toddler. Once at me.

A voice in my head commands, Stop fighting. All of you. Arden. Clem. Come.

I know that every dragon—every dragon, even those halfway across the world— heard the same command.

A moment later Arden and Clem are beside me. Together, we bow.

“Rise,” Rha speaks, this time aloud so only we can hear. “And shift, please.”

It only takes us a thought. One thought, and Arden is a short female with soft curves and two legs instead of four. One thought, and Clem is a lanky man with squinting eyes—he’s basically blind in human form without his glasses. One thought, and my flesh is smooth instead of scaled.

We could pass for human, if not for our eyes. Arden’s remain gold, mine so blue they are nearly clear, Clem’s violet. Our eyes never change.

All of us but Rha can shift. Most of us were born in human form and learned how to shift into dragon form later. No one knows how Rha was born. But we know he is all dragon, no human.

I wish I were like Rha.

“You tried to kill her?” he asks us.

We nod.

“Show me.”

One by one, we repeat what we did in the forest.

I kneel when we are done, my fist hitting the floor beside the toddler hard enough that it cracks. The toddler squeals. “I am sorry our breath has failed you, my King.”

A single corner of Rha’s lip rises. “Do not apologize. You have done well, children. You have found the next musician.”

“The next what?” Arden asks at the same time Clem breathes, "Really?"

Rha rises, fireflies scattering away. One paw reaches out, a talon extending, to lift the violin charm from the toddler’s neck. “This was prophesied long ago. She is chosen. When she is older, she will learn to play the violin, and her music will lead humans and dragons into union. It will help us understand how to understand one another.”

I can’t help it. I laugh.

“Everett,” Clem hisses.

But Rha only looks at me. “I understand your doubt, Everett. But she is our best hope of making peace with the humans. She is our best hope of survival.”

“I don’t understand how a toddler and a violin is going to win a war.”

Rha shakes his head. “The trouble is, Everett, you don’t try to understand. That's the trouble with most of the world, really. But that’s alright. She will help you to.” He pauses. “Who carried her here?”

Arden and Clem point to me. I resist the urge to roll my eyes at them both.

“Then you will be the one to raise her. Bring her to me once a year. I want to see as she grows. And when she can play, I want to hear her music.”

“Surely there’s someone else that—”

I have chosen Everett to raise the girl. She is one of them. But she is also one of us. If anyone harms her or Everett, they will hear from me.

Fuck.

****

We decide to call her Ashbel.

Our homes are tucked into the top of the trees. I bring her to mine. Clem helps me build her a cradle. Arden reads her stories of battles to lull her to sleep. I do my best to ignore her cries in the middle of the night but always end up lifting her from the cradle, swaying with her in my arms, until she falls back asleep.

“Every time I look at her,” Arden tells me one night, “I am torn between loving her and killing her.”

“Every time I look at her,” I answer, “all I can think about is strangling her.”

Clem looks at me with disapproval.

I roll my shoulders. “It’s not like I’m going to.”

****

I have nightmares most nights. My parents scream for their son, and I fly as fast I can, but when I reach them they are already drained. Dead. Humans dance around them, high off their blood.

I wake up gasping. Ashbel learns to crawl from her cradle and into my bed.

She lays on top of my chest.

Her small hands rest over my heart until it slows again.

***

On her third birthday we have a party for her in the field at the top of the cliffs. The best deer is eaten and the best wine is swallowed.

I take my eyes off of her for a heartbeat to pour myself more wine.

When I look up she is sitting in Lima’s lap. Lima runs her fingers through her red curls. Her icy eyes meet mine.

A dare.

I cross the field.

I kneel before Lima so she can see in my eyes that I mean it when I say, “Touch her again and I’ll freeze you to death.”

Then I pick Ashbel up and help her cut her deer.

***

When she is five, I let her fly on my back for the first time.

Her fingers cling to my scales. I go slowly, listening to the sound of her laugh over the rush of the wind. I bring her to an island a few miles from shore. On the beach, I show her how to dive under waves, teach her what names to call the different types of fish. I show her how to de-scale them, how to gut them, how to set a fire when Arden isn’t around to do it for her.

She loves flying almost as much as I do.

***

When it storms, she screams.

Music is the only thing that makes her stop crying.

***

When she is seven, Clem makes her a violin.

None of us know how to play. When he hands it to her she looks at me, her evergreen eyes wide. “What do I do with this?”

“Save the world.”

“Oh, just that?”

I smile. A little. “Just that.”

She plucks a single string.

The sound is not particularly beautiful. But it sets something in me loose.

I hate myself for it. But I am beginning to become her friend.

***

When she is ten, I teach her how to fight.

We only train at night. I don’t want the others to see me training a human. Even with Rha’s blessing, Ashbel’s existence here isn’t welcomed.

I teach her how to throw a punch and how to take one. Train her to be strong enough to lift a sword and fast enough to hide from something chasing her in the sky.

After, we sit, watching the stars while I point out the constellations.

“Why did they leave me there?” she asks me one night, her head on my shoulder.

I wrap an arm around her to keep her warm. I don’t think, anymore, about how she is human.

She doesn’t feel human.

“Who?”

“My parents.”

And it makes me wonder.

Would it be worse for them to be dead?

Or for them to be alive but want nothing to do with you?

***

I bring her to Rha each year. Each year, she plays for him.

She teaches herself, and the older she grows the more beautiful the music becomes. But each year, Rha shakes his head and says, “Not yet.”

***

When she is thirteen she makes me a cake on my birthday.

“Where did you get the ingredients?” Arden laughs, shoving her face.

“I stole them.”

“That’s my girl,” Arden praises at the same time I accuse, “From where?”

“The humans.”

“You are human,” Clem explains slowly. “You know that, right?”

Ashbel scowls. “You don’t always have to remind me.”

I pick at the cake. “I've never had someone make me a cake before,” I mumble.

“Well,” Ashbel puts her hands on her hips proudly, “you’re welcome, then.”

I look at her. Swallow a bite. “Thank you.”

***

When she is sixteen, five of us are found in the forest, drained. Rha sends Clem and four others after them to get revenge.

Two days pass without Clem returning.

“Stay here,” I order her as Arden and I get ready to go after him.

At sixteen, she talks. A lot.

“I want to come with,” she complains.

And complains. A lot.

“You can’t.”

“But—”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Then why are you and Arden going?”

She’s worried. I haven’t seen her this worried before. But she loves Clem—we all do. I’m more than worried. I’m terrified. If I find him and he’s not okay…..

“Because we’re better than you,” Arden answers for me, winking.

“Everett—”

“What she said.”

Ashbel huffs. “Arrogant dragon.”

“Arrogant girl.”

Arden laughs. “That’s right, Ashbel. Throw that sass around like the prophesied child you are.”

It motivates Ashbel to keep trying. “I can help, I swear. I’m here for a reason, right? I just want to know what the fuck I’m made of.”

I pause. Arden and I are perched on the edge of my treehouse’s balcony, ready to leap into the sky and shift. I look over my shoulder. “You will,” I promise. “And don’t swear.”

We find Clem half-buried under the snow. The humans shoot us from the sky with spears. One sticks out of his stomach.

Arden carries him home while I hunt the ones that dared do this to my friend. I find them quickly enough. Freeze them and then freeze their families and then freeze their neighbors.

When I return, I am still hot with rage, and Clem’s head is in Ashbel’s lap while she plays her violin.

It is the most beautiful I have ever heard her play.

It is a dawn morning with nothing to do all day and the golden hour at the ocean. It is goosebumps on a lover’s skin and it is laughter from a mother’s lips. It is a full belly and light rain. It is the peacefulness of sleep and it is the endlessness of consciousness. It is the warm rush of home after fighting the cold and it is the sound of the person’s name you love the most.

It is hope.

It replaces all my anger. Leaves it cool and still. A pond instead of a tsunami.

“It makes the pain go away,” Clem whispers to me when I crouch beside him. “She makes the pain go away.”

He doesn’t die. But he should have.

I wonder if Ashbel has anything to do with it.

***

When she is nineteen, Lima tries to kill her.

I wake to find her bed empty and something in me knows. I fly to find Lima dangling Ashbel headfirst over the cliffs.

Arden and Clem fly near them growling but are afraid to breathe. If they do all Lima has to do is let go.

I, however, am not afraid. I breathe, freezing Lima’s talons to Ashbel’s foot, the second I am close enough to hit her. Lima screams when I dive into them, breaking the frozen bond and shattering Lima’s talons. I catch Ashbel by her shirt with my teeth. Throw her back onto the field.

I turn to Lima.

“I told you what I would do,” is the last thing she hears.

***

Rha sends me away for six months.

We’re not supposed to kill one another. Our numbers dwindle nearly everyday. What I did was stupid. Cruel. Kiling a dragon for a human.

I don’t expect him to ever call me back. I make a life for myself on the cliffs further north. Hunt humans, fish, deer, and bear. Think about Clem and Arden and Ashbel.

Mostly Ashbel.

Until, one dusk, I hear Rha’s voice say, Come home.

The night I do we all—even Ashbel—get wasted in Arden’s treehouse.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Ashbel tells me. “Karma would have gotten her if you hadn’t.”

I grunt. “I don’t believe in karma.”

“Well if your karma doesn’t hit you,” she crosses her legs and raises her cup of wine to her lips, “I fucking will.”

“Do I have bad karma?”

“Of course you do.”

“For what?”

“You left me alone here for half a year.”

“I thought all your lives were better without me.”

She looks at me. She declares, very seriously, “Mine wasn’t.”

That night, she tries to crawl into my bed.

I think that she is beautiful.

I think that she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

But I raised her. And even though she is grown now and I will forever be trapped in a twenty-one year’s old body, something about that fact makes me stop her.

“I am sorry,” I whisper in the dark.

She sighs. “It’s okay. I understand. It just sucks, you know?”

“What does?”

“We’re both so magical. But we somehow still have the rare misfortune of not being worshipped.” She shrugs. “I thought maybe we could give that to each other.”

***

When she is twenty, she plays for us all.

And the music….

I see human babies squealing and pink skin and blue ribbons. I see a woman sleeping on a man’s chest and young girls laughing over a fire. I see lavender cheeks and I hear their music. I see children helping fallen children stand, I see money being given freely, I see love given unconditionally. I see art and I see war and I see peace. I feel the rush of discovering something new, see stories unfolding inside of minds, see twinkling lights on holidays and shared sweaters and hear screaming because they care. I taste the sweetness of their food. I hear the stories they tell and I feel the tiredness in their bodies but most importantly I feel the tiredness in their minds, a constant weight telling them to fall, to cry, to give up, to hate themselves.

Do humans feel like this everyday?

“Yes,” Ashbel tells me when I ask. “That’s why they want it so badly.”

I understand now.

***

When she is twenty-one, Rha tells her that she is ready.

I fly her to the nearest town.

Set her on the ground.

“I—” I stop. I can’t.

She puts a hand on my face. “It’s okay, Everett. I know.”

She walks away, violin in hand.

Ready to make peace.

A part of me really thinks that she can.

And she does. When the first town hears her music they lower their spears and weep because now they understand the weight in our minds. Now they see their own parents' bodies drained and feel the cold of the cliffs and the fear in our bones and they understand.

She makes it to sixteen towns.

She makes sixteen towns see.

We have hope—so much hope—for months.

Until the seventeenth.

She walks into the seventeenth town playing her violin, and a man that makes money selling our blood rips it from her hands, and before Arden or Clem or I am fast enough to kill him he slits her throat and kills her first.

I hold her while she dies and watch the secrets fade from her evergreen eyes.

I can finally hear them. All of her secrets.

I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. So horribly, violently, recklessly tragic of me.

I want to dissolve here, with her in my arms—like snow. I want to melt.

Clem puts a hand on my shoulder. “If you start a battle now everything will have been for nothing.”

“You want a battle?” I laugh, and I sound crazy even to myself. “I’ll give you a fucking war.”

No one can stop me as I freeze everything in sight.

***

It doesn’t matter.

The humans' new favorite tale is the one of the human girl that fell in love with the dragon man, and how he gave up everything he had left because the humans took the one thing he really wanted.

I know it’s their stories that teach them how to think. How to treat themselves and others. She taught me that.

They begin to make laws protecting us. Ban our blood. Soon, we return to the forest. Soon, more of her are born.

Even though she is dead, she has done what she needed to anyway.