The Rose of Vraycia

Of Dragons and Gold - P1

I was nine years old the first time I saw the Dragons.

I should clarify, for the sake of honesty, that I was also flat on my back in the dirt at the time. Tyreal had knocked me down. My own fault entirely, as I had made the catastrophic tactical error of gaping at the sky while we sparred, and my younger brother was never one to miss an opportunity.

But from the dust of the training yard, I had the better view as they circled the Palace of An'Shar, and so perhaps the fall was worth it. They were massive. Any one of them could have carried off a warhorse without strain. But it was not their size that stopped my breath.

It was how they moved.

Even at that scale, they cut through the air with a hawk's precision. Power and grace, fused into something terrible and perfect.

That image seared itself into me. I carried it through all the centuries that followed, and nothing dimmed it. I had decided, in the thoughtful and absolute way that nine-year-olds decide things, that nothing ever would.

I was wrong about that. But then, I have already told you that being wrong is something of a lifelong occupation for me.

I met her eight hundred years later, in a hall that reeked of fear and filth.

In eight hundred years, I have smelled a great many terrible things. Battlefields left to the sun. The great bogs of Rish'Noth. Vythros, after a week trapped in an owl bear's cave. I have a hierarchy of wretchedness, carefully curated and, I assure you, extensively sourced.

Three hundred years on, that morning in the Grand Hall of An'Shar still holds a place near the top of it.

The Grand Hall of An’Shar palace was beautiful, as it always was. Two great inner courtyards flanking it on either side, summer gardens breathing through wide archways, heavy with jasmine and bloom. On any other morning, the scent moved through that space like something close to grace.

That morning, it wasn't enough.

Nothing would have been.

Weeks in the belly of a cargo ship. Fresh terror. The rot of untended wounds, and the particular wretchedness of people who had not been permitted the dignity of food, water, or a bath.

That was how the prisoners of Vraycia arrived.