Something very important, huh?
The Windrider sighed as she opened her eyes once more, her faint psychic grasp lifting Latch's letter before her yet again. She'd read and re-read it dozens of times, unable to stop thinking about it even as the sun set around her. Despite her many attempts to rest, sleep refused to arrive, just like her friend's words refused to leave her mind.
The excitement therein wasn't anything unusual for him. However, it was almost always aimed towards his research—and even then, only when he had confirmed a discovery or another. To see it regard something concerning her, and sensitive enough for him to refrain from describing it... left her confused.
For what could even be out there that truly concerned her anymore?
The thought cut through her idle pondering. The shrieks of her friend's letter getting creased in her psychic grasp broke the silence. It hurt to think about, but was a valid consideration. For all the years they've known each other, Latch knew little about her. Definitely not for the lack of trying, either. She was a friend to him, a title she held with joy. At the same time, he also treated her like a puzzle, a living box of secrets and mysteries that had grasped his curiosity and refused to let go.
His nickname for her—a single sound his language approximated to 'V'—was the closest he'd ever gotten to glimpsing one of said secrets. She remembered being annoyed at it once; angry that he'd overheard her drunken reminiscing of the conversations she'd had with her kin over a millennium ago and had somehow figured out which of the whistled, growled sounds corresponded to her name.
Nobody would ever utter it ever again; the intricacies of its pronunciation lost to anyone not of her kin. Nobody was to even try, either. For their names were sacred, gifts from the emerald deity of dragons itself.
And yet, the Windrider was glad Latch kept trying.
It wasn't much; he would never even get close, but... it was a connection. One much closer than she'd had with anyone since the tragedy that had devoured the archipelago she'd just made her pilgrimage to. She doubted she would ever meet someone like him again, someone so willing to chip away at her defenses, so determined to find out more about her as a person and not a demigod or a being of legend. Too stubborn to ever bounce off her aloofness. Maybe one day she'd finally crack, finally open up, finally admit to the most terrifying truth of all—
That, between her solitude and fraying memories, there just wasn't much to her anymore.
Anyhow.
She let go of his letter and closed her eyes once more, focusing on the sounds of the ocean. She'd maintained her determination for an impressive two minutes before curiosity reared its head again. And, once more, it honed in on the subject of Latch's message.
The best—and most unrealistic—scenario would be the news of more of her kin having been found by some distant exploratory mission. The Windrider considered it only for a moment before shaking the thought aside. She had already lost many, many decades to futile searching. The last thing she needed was to fall into that hole again.
So, if not that, what else? Very few even remotely plausible ideas sprang to mind, and she had lived far too long to derive any pleasure in outlandish speculation anymore. Or, at least, so she thought. Perhaps she just hadn't had any topics interesting enough to daydream about in the recent past; her mind suffocated by idle reminiscing, regrets, and... less than pleasant sights surrounding her whenever she stayed with Latch.
Not from him, thankfully. As far as the dragon was concerned, her friend was the shining star of his people; the very best and most thoughtful that Golden Sky had to offer. Sadly, all that meant that whenever she looked out the windows from his workshop, whenever she descended from his tower, whenever she attempted to talk to anyone, she only saw misery.
Castes upon castes. A vast empire, fueled by forced labor in its many vassal territories. Ruled by bureaucrats who have long since lost the ability to perceive their people as anything but an amorphous mass to be assigned and optimized. Whether there were any noble ideas left in its heart, any of the light she had once seen in its people when it was but a single settlement...
The Windrider didn't know.
She didn't want to think about it, either.
With her train of thought sufficiently chilled by the unpleasant topic, sleep didn't take long to arrive. It was arduous, bereft of either physical comfort or emotional calm, but it was there. She was used to it, really. Rest was something mortal beings experienced, something she was by her very nature above.
Which wasn't true in the slightest. But sometimes, when she really tried hard to, she could just about delude herself into thinking so. It was easier that way, to pretend she had never lost anything and her current state was just how she'd always been—broken and restless.
There was bliss in that doomed finality, release from any effort to even try to move on. It wasn't ever strong enough to overcome her profound exhaustion, but that was a minor detail.
Like many times before, the Windrider woke up before dawn, already protectively curled up and shrouded by her reflective down. After pulling her body out of its defensive posture, she cleaned up the space around herself and finished the leftover provisions she couldn't force into her stomach the previous evening. If today would go as planned, she'd arrive in Golden Sky before noon, get comfortable in what was once a storage room in Latch's workshop—now her makeshift den—and preferably stay there until the next full moon.
While listening to Latch go on about whatever he'd discovered, of course.
The thought provided just the kick needed to wrap up her meal and clean up everything she could after herself. Latch's letter, shed down and feathers, any crumbs large enough for her keen eyesight to spot. All of them were grasped with her psychics, crushed, incinerated with a few wisps of dragonfire, and their ash discarded into the wind. Until, at last, no signs of her presence had remained.
Until, at last, she had joined her kin in being but a ghost.
With her ghostly host not seeming to be around, the Windrider closed the door to the tiny outpost and flew off. The earliest tinges of light were brushing against one end of the sky, wordlessly guiding her on where to go. Westward, towards the jewel of the empire. Away from the light. Outracing the sunrise for just that bit longer.
Each mile to the west brought her further and further into skies and seas she recognized, the increasingly familiar path getting rid of at least that source of stress. She was certain she could traverse the rest of the way there with her eyes closed, guided solely by her sense of place in the world. Or, if she were to be mean—and not undeservedly so—by her nose alone.
The juvenile thought forced the briefest of chuckles from her snout; the sound utterly dwarfed by the deafening rush of wind brought on by her flight. As much as she wanted to sprint the rest of the way there as fast as her aging body would allow, it was in hers and Latch's best interest to avoid being noticed as much as possible, and that demanded more conservative velocities.
Being exposed to the Golden Sky's ships and the forced labor force that powered them for any longer than necessary was regrettable, but it wasn't what annoyed her the most. It was the sun, rapidly gaining ground on her and lighting up the surrounding skies. Oh, how it burned, from Wiki purple to Pecha pink; from Sitrus yellow to Rawst blue. A divine spectacle, possibly the only one in the entire small world that hadn't ever ceased to fill her with awe.
She hated it. It made her reminisce.
How many nights she had spent talking with Love about the nature of mortal and divine existence, how many days she had spent resting in the ornate shrine the pink-shelled deity had called home. How many dawns she had watched by her side, exhausted, exhilarated, sometimes even exasperated. Too many to count—or forget. The cruel reality of that fact filled the dragon's white and red body with rage.
Tried as she might to contain her emotions, they only kept building up, handily winning the fight against her usual detachment. They screamed for release, one she finally granted them once the any and all ships were firmly past the horizon. Thunder after Thunder obscured her cries as it boiled the waters below, promising to relieve her fury but only adding to it while draining her strength.
Love wouldn't have wanted her to do this, to degrade herself to Valor at His worst. The thought stung, cutting her display of impotent wrath short. And with it stopped, the feelings it had been obscuring were finally allowed to resume.
And so, the Windrider wept, resuming her invisible flight.
The only thing that hurt more than losing them all was knowing what happened to them afterwards. She might not have been successful in finding her kin, but with time, she had tracked down the whereabouts of the husks that used to be her friends and mentors. Most of them, at least.
Passage had been swept away in the waves She once reigned over, carried by the tides until making landfall. The suffocating mists She had brought with Herself drove away all those who once lived near, and the briny tears endlessly spilling from Her shell had eroded the very land beneath Her. To the best of the Windrider's knowledge, She was still in the same spot over two centuries later, sinking into the earth and poisoning the groundwaters, surrounded by endlessly growing crystals of salt.
Hers was the most merciful end of the ones the dragon knew for certain.
Love's lust for life and cruelty alike had persisted, even with her mind gone. Drawn to the former, only to inflict the latter upon it. All who as much as saw Her were subjected to incapacitating mental torture, ending only with their deaths or an exceedingly lucky escape. Beyond just sentient beings, however, Her curse extended to all that was alive. Plants flayed and withered, the soil grew barren, fungi turned into ash; the air itself was brought to a standstill.
She was the most dangerous and the hardest to track; Her bond with Her islands intense enough for any disturbance to draw Her attention. Sometimes, what followed was a Teleport across the globe—a display of psychic power obscene enough to glass the sterile sand all around her—followed by swift death of whatever fool that thought it wise to disturb the cursed land. But only sometimes.
Bloom, on the other hand, remained unaccounted for. Year after year, decade after decade, all spent scouring the shores of the surrounding continents in search of Him, with nothing to show for it. The dragon's best guess was that He was terrorizing the depths of the ocean, a place not even she could reach.
Valor's fate was the most violent one, as befit Him. Locked into an unending, fiery rage, His movement throughout the globe used to be as unpredictable as the lightning itself. One day, He would circle the same spot in the middle of the ocean; another, he would race straight towards the nearest coastal settlement before blasting it into shreds and hunting down everyone trying to escape.
Golden Sky averting that fate—and containing what remained of Valor—made the Windrider pay attention to them.
According to their boastful legends, their mine was sacred, blessed with unending ore, with their city having grown around it. The truth, to the best of the dragon's knowledge, was... less glamorous, but broadly the same. There was a scar in reality going through those caverns, forever changing and renewing them—and forever trapping any soul unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Mining was a crucial job, relegated to prisoners and vagrants; their mummified remains doomed to be one-day discovered in a 'new' tunnel of this Mysterious Dungeon the Golden Sky viewed as hallowed.
Realizing they could not fight against the husk of a deity, the rulers of Golden Sky staked everything on their sacred mine. Valor was lured there, body after body, until He was far enough in for the unending caves to trap Him. It was a costly, nigh-pyrrhic victory, costing thousands upon thousands of lives, as well as their main supply of raw ore.
And if that was where their involvement ended, the Windrider might have even found them respectable.
There have been talks—still rumors, at this point—of tapping into the trapped deity's unending wrath and His raw electric power. The mere thought of one of her mentors being reduced to a pile of charcoal in a furnace disgusted her. She knew her opinion wouldn't amount to anything, though.
After all, she was just like Him—a ghost of an age long past, thrashing aimlessly in a world that was no longer her home.
...
...
Onward.