The Lostling

1

Xyranna spied the wreckage from a mile in the air. In a remote area far away from human kind, where it was free for dragons to fly in the open without usually being seen, the sight of something unnatural to the wild was enough to shift Xyranna’s mood from one of sorrow to one of curiosity.

The new dawn came as it always did — impassive and indifferent to the inner workings of the creatures in the world; unaware that there were those who had spent the night in grief. Xyranna chose to spend the night in the air, hoping that flying would prove to be a useful distraction from her pain, but she found herself swimming in memories of flying with Nivoreth — her one true love.

The morning’s first signs of life appeared as birds soared from their nests, flying skyward before swiftly avoiding the giant blue dragon they encountered. The morning air smelled of a coming rain, and a chilly mist had settled down into the mountainside obscuring a lot of the finer details of the forest, though Xyranna had no difficulty seeing through it.

At the first sight of the wreckage, Xyranna thought to just keep flying. What did it matter to her that there were some humans who had gotten themselves lost or hurt in the woods? Serves them right for wandering this far. But her mind didn’t immediately return to thinking about Nivoreth, and to her, that minor bit of relief warranted a look. She banked around and angled her nose toward the ground to get a better look.

Splintered wood and supplies littered the bottom of a sheer cliff that rose a thousand feet high, and a large pile of rocks and fallen trees rested at the bottom. From her vantage point, she could also see the top of the cliff where a large portion of the ground had broken away.

She flicked her tongue out and tasted the air. Mostly, she picked up the moisture of the mist, the crispness of the mountain air, and the beginnings of what would turn out to be a heavy rainfall, but she also detected fainter scents that seemed as though they were buried within the greater ones — acrid smoke, burnt tinder, and human blood.

The smell of blood nearly caused her to fall out of the sky. Her sadness morphed into anger, and she folded her wings into a diamond and dove hard toward the ground. The memory of Nivoreth’s body impaled by a giant ballista missile flooded her mind and banished all other thoughts. She wanted to scream her anguish and rage as she dove, but centuries of draconic discipline and dragon pride would not allow her to forfeit her dignity. Instead, she opened her nostrils and allowed the full scope of the scene to invade her senses.

She knew before she landed that all of the humans had perished. If there had been any alive, she would have detected their living scent or she would have heard their heartbeats. Her claws dug into the ground when she hit the forest floor. The main part of the wreckage was buried in the pile of rocks that had clearly been sheared away from the top of the cliff.

A small part of her mind wondered what had caused the cliff to break away like that since it didn’t look like it had happened naturally — the break at the top was clean, and the rock underneath was smooth instead of jagged, as though a giant chisel had been used on the stone. The smoke came from burnt wood still smoldering with orange embers. Xyranna tasted the kerosene the humans would have used to light torches at night. She also found bits of human flesh in the rubble; the stink of which nearly made her gag. Her mood sank. There was nothing of interest here, and she found her thoughts drifting again.

This is a waste of time, she thought. She was angry at herself for allowing her emotions get the best of her and for trying to distract herself from her grief. She knew better, and her attempt to avoid mourning was, quite frankly, an insult to Nivoreth’s memory.

Aching to return to the sky, she unfurled her wings, but before she lifted of, a sudden rustling noise caught her attention.

Her first thought was that it was a squirrel. She’d smelled plenty of them when she got close to the forest, and her mouth watered at the thought. She wasn’t tired from the hours of flying, and she wasn’t exactly hungry, but a meal was a meal. She knew that it would be all too easy to neglect the nurturing of her body given her state, and maybe a small snack would at least raise her mood a little.

But what walked out from the behind a tree was not a squirrel. Xyranna was momentarily confused because what she smelled did not match what she saw. The scent ought to have been pungent and bitter, but it was not. The legs and arms were tiny, and its movements were clumsy, as though it were not used to walking. Its head that was, at first, looking down at the ground, raised up, and a little hand reached up and brushed small wisps of hair out of tiny eyes.

From the tree, a human child peered back at her.

2

Xyranna first noted the child’s crown of bright yellow hair, as though it were made of sunflowers. Then she met her eyes, and dark green irises stared back at her — irises that matched his scales so closely that she almost heard his voice call out to her in that crooning voice he used when they were together. But no, they couldn’t be. Suddenly her scales felt too heavy, and her knees threatened to give out at any time. What little hunger she thought she’d had was gone; she felt more like vomiting now.

But reason caught up quickly with Xyranna. The girl had nothing to do with him. It was only because she’d been missing him that she saw what she wanted to see. She’d heard about this happening to other dragons before — they’d see things in others that were similar to the one they lost. Her breathing slowed, and she allowed herself to open her nostrils fully to the child to try and understand why she didn’t smell her to begin with. She smelled like lavender and something that resembled her home in the mountains, though she couldn’t immediately place it.

The girl couldn’t have been more than two years old. She stared curiously at Xyranna without a trace of fear in her posture. Most of her blonde hair covered one shoulder, and her mouth was slightly open to match her curious demeanor.

Also, something compelled her to move toward the child. It was as though her feet were trying to move on their own, and Xyranna was having difficulty restraining them. The child also seemed to be having the same struggle. She kept stumbling as though something were pushing her over. Xyranna didn’t think that she was in any danger, but she was alarmed by the compulsion to close the distance between them.

Eventually it became too difficult to resist, and she allowed herself to move closer to the child. But she moved slow, inching her way with her head low to the ground like a dog cautiously approaching a stranger. When they were close enough, Xyranna pointed her snout towards the child, and she knew before it happened that the child was going to touch her muzzle. She both wanted it to happen and didn’t want it to happen.

The tiny hand brushed the tip of her nose with the softest sweetest touch. When it did, light seemed to burst into Xyranna’s vision. Her body went limp, but her face stayed riveted to the same position. The girl’s hair flew out behind her as though she were walking headlong into a great wind, and her eye closed peacefully as the sensations washed over them.

Xyranna became aware that she could feel something pressing in on her consciousness. It wasn’t a hard press, but there was definitely something trying to get into her mind. Her instinct told her it was safe, for in that moment she felt nothing but a natural benevolence about her that she’d never felt before. And, like the way her feet naturally wanted to move toward the child, so too her mind desired to fully relax and let whatever was pressing in on her mind full access to it. The only reason it wasn’t doing so now was because she hadn’t decided to relax yet.

When she did, emotions, images, and sensations that didn’t belong to her flowed through her consciousness. She felt a sense of curiosity. When an image of herself passed by her mind, there was a feeling of awe. There was a terrible longing for an older human female that almost brought a tear to her eyes. Most strange among all of them was the image of falling a great distance and not being able to fly, then being bathed in a brilliant light that kept her from hitting the ground with everything else.

When the images and sensations faded, her knees buckles, and her head drooped. She knew enough about magic to know that she’d likely felt the effect of some kind of spell, but she didn’t know what it was. Emotions and thoughts kept coming to her mind that didn’t seem to be hers. Most prominent was a sense of wonder that Xyranna didn’t recall ever feeling.

Looking down at the child, she thought to herself, This is just a human girl, isn’t it? The girl jerked her head up and smiled at the dragon as though she had heard her thought. She smiled and danced, shaking her bottom with her arms up in the air and her index fingers pointing straight up.

Xyranna laughed as the girl danced, and the girl’s joy reverberated through her. This was extraordinary. Unless she was mistaken, they could now touch each other’s minds.

You are a fun, exuberant little child. Do you have a name?

The girl seemed to falter in her reverie, and her joy was replaced by a small feeling of confusion. It was obvious that she didn’t understand the question.

What do the other humans call you, Little One?

An image came to Xyranna in the form of a woman holding a baby to her breast and crooning to it as she rocked her back and forth to sleep. The image wasn’t clear, and it seemed blurry along the edges. The sounds that she heard carried distortions and seemed strangely far away.

That means that you can’t remember, doesn’t it?

The girl bent down and picked up a stick. She waved it around a few times and then started poking things on the ground. Her attention seemed to have drifted, and Xyranna felt through this bond, or whatever it was, that she was starting to get bored. She watched the child poking a piece of moss, seeming to not have a care in the world, and felt a rush of compassion for her realizing that she too had suffered a great loss.

Poor little Lostling. The emotions from the child mixed with her own through their bond, even though the child didn’t seem to be feeling much, and Xyranna’s compassion for the child added to the already strong feelings of grief. Now she was hurting for this child in addition to her loss.

The child immediately ran over and hugged her, nuzzling her face into her scales. The emotions that were not hers plainly said I don’t want you to hurt.

She tucked a wing around her, and they held each other like that for a long time.

3

The rain came in that evening. Xyranna, after deciding to spend the night with the child, created a fire with her breath for warmth and spread her wings out over the both of them like a tent. She also made a bed of moss for the Lostling, which she’d spread out next to the fire. It was a cozy setup for the night.

Xyranna had become very fond of the child over the last few hours of spending time with her. She found being around her comforting, even amusing whenever the girl tried to play with her, and she allowed herself to be caught in the fun of being chased or pretending to not see her when she was hiding.

She still didn’t understand the mental connection between them, nor did she understand her natural fondness for the girl. In a strange way, though she’d never had the opportunity to experience it directly, she felt as though the child were her own — the emotional bond she felt toward her seemed to represent the connection described by other dragons when talking about their young. Why did she feel this way toward a human child though? She perused her knowledge of dragon history, but she remembered no story of something like this happening before. She thought she could recall times when dragons shared minds with each other, but she couldn’t remember any actual accounts or stories.

The child sat next to the fire warming her hands. There was no emotion coming from her, and Xyranna thought this a curiosity since she had just been through a tragic ordeal. As she watched her, she found her thoughts drifting back to Nivoreth, only this time she thought about how the child seemed to remind her of him.

Her eyes matched the same color of his scales, and her demeanor even seemed to mimic his unusually stoic self even in the midst of difficult situations. She felt tears wet her eyes as she remembered him. If there was just one way that she could talk to him one more time…

As if in response to these thoughts, the Lostling reaching into a pocket and withdrew a small object. She turned it around several times in her hands nonchalantly as if it were just a toy to her. But Xyranna stiffened when she saw it, because she knew exactly what it was. The green, iridescent color that seemed to reflect off the firelight, the texture like glass but nowhere near as fragile. She had spent so many evenings pressed against them she thought she’d recognize one from a mile away. There was no doubt that it belonged to him, because every dragon has scales unique to it. But what was this child doing with it? The image of his body impaled intruded her mind, and her body recoiled at the thought.

The Lostling took notice, because as the thoughts flowed through her, the girl recoiled in a similar way. She turned and looked up at Xyranna. Obviously sensing her displeasure, she looked down at the scale and seemed to consider it. Then she reached a hand out toward Xyranna, offering the scale to her. Apprehension flooding through her, she raised her hand palm up, and she placed the scale in her hand.

It happened in an instant. She felt as though she were in a different place. The temperature was warmer, and the trees were more exotic. But there was no mistaking where she was. This was her favorite place in all the world; the place where they spent most of their time together. Everything was just as she remembered it, and sitting on top of his favorite rock…

Nivoreth.

He looked magnificent — his scales seemed to shine brighter, and he looked stronger and more fierce than she had ever seen him in this life. His eyes seemed to feast on her, as though she were the most beautiful and dear thing to him in the world.

“My dear Xyranna,” he said, and his voice echoed all around her. Her whole body trembled at the sound, and she felt her muscles weaken. She never thought she’d hear him speak to her again. Her eyes immediately flowed with tears, and her body flattened on the ground as her knees gave out.

He looked down at her, compassion etched all over his magnificent features. Perhaps he knew the anguish that she was in and the hardships that she’d experienced — How she thought of nothing but him since she’d heard that he died. How she hadn’t returned to the other dragons since. How she secretly hoped, on the occasion that she’d found the human wreckage, that they would kill her if she provoked them. The disappointment she felt when she learned that everyone but the Lostling was dead. —

She dug her claws into the ground. No words formed on her mouth. Nivoreth did not move from his spot on the rock. He touched a spot over his heart as he said, “I’m so sorry, my love. I am sorry for leaving you. My heart longs for us to be together for all of time, but it seems that Destiny did not have that in mind for us when she wrote the stories of the world.”

Xyranna continued to weep on the ground, but her eyes sought his as he spoke.

“I’ve come because I want you to be comforted in this time of mourning. I know how much you wanted a child, my love, and I want you to know how deeply I hurt at not being able to give you one. But do not despair. I have found a way to give you what you want.”

At this Xyranna raised her heard toward him. “H-how can this be?”

“When we learned that we could not conceive, I sought the help of a well-known human alchemist.”

Xyranna looked shocked at hearing this — dragons did not ask humans for help on principle — but she said nothing, giving him the chance to explain himself.

“He told me that he believed there was a way to blend human and dragon blood and that the combination of the two could save the lives of many sick humans. He said theoretically, it was possible, but it would require that the humans who received the treatment would have to live among dragons to keep them safe. He asked me if I was serious, would I be willing to give him some of my blood. I told him I was willing.

“And when I did, he mixed it with the blood of a child that was ill and not long for this world. The intervention saved her, but it also gave her certain draconic features. Her life will now be as long as any dragon, her personality became more dragon than human, and I’m sure you noticed that her eyes are now the same color of my scales. They changed immediately from brown to green.”

Xyranna smiled at this.

“But the combination of dragon and human blood had some effects the alchemist did not anticipate as well. For instance, the girl gained the ability to share her emotions and sensations with whoever she wishes, and she receives the same from them in return. The alchemist considered that she would either be a great danger or an object of envy to others. He feared that something would happen to her or me once the humans learned what we had done, so he took one of my scales and used her to imbue it with a bit of my essence — a bit of my spirit, if you will — to commune with you and explain should we lose each other, as did happen.

“The plan was that the girl would be raised by her mother, but when she reached maturity, she would be brought to us so that we could raise her as one of our own. Her draconic instincts would compel her to be with us, so there would be little chance of her choosing to stay at her human home. The mother agreed because the alternative was that her daughter would die from her illness. She pleaded with us, ’Please just save my baby’.

“But as you saw, the wagon carrying her and her mother was destroyed. The dragon magic saved the girl, but the mother was killed. Destiny, it seems, has a plan of her own. She did not see it fit for me to be party to my own plans. I was killed by humans. The alchemist died not long after that. But she seems to take pity on you, my love. You see, it wasn’t an accident that you were flying over that particular area today.”

Xyranna was holding her breath. “W-what does this mean?”

Nivoreth finally moved from his perch and laid a hand on her. “It means, my love, that the girl belongs to you. She is your daughter. She is the child that you always wanted.”

4

Xyranna lay on the ground. The rain continued to pour around them, and the Lostling had fallen asleep next to the fire, still dry from being under her wings. The vision of Nivoreth had been a wonderful gift, but somehow she knew, that after it had ended, she would not be able to commune with him again. Magic like that is rarely so powerful as to last a long time. She was, nevertheless, grateful and comforted by it.

Her eyes sought the child, and she felt her heart explode with love. She was hers. She had a daughter. No longer would she be alone, and no longer would the Lostling remain lost.

As the morning dawned, she could no longer contain her joy. The girl awoke, and Xyranna scooped her up into her arms. With a roar of triumph and and happiness, she leapt into the sky, and the child squealed her glee as they climbed higher and higher. A pleasure such that she had never experienced before erupted in Xyranna as she realized what she had become.

She was a mother.