Wings of the Unchosen

The Walk Back

(Mira's POV)

I don’t remember deciding to stand. One moment I was kneeling on the cobblestones with my hand against Sair’s scales, and the next I was upright, and the crowd was still staring, and nobody seemed to know what to do with me. Including, I think, me.

The captain who’d grabbed my arm earlier had backed away to a safe distance, though her eyes never left Sair. More soldiers had arrived, a dozen of them now, fanned out in a loose half circle, weapons drawn but pointed at nothing in particular. Nobody wanted to be the one to make the first move. I understood that feeling completely.

“The Warden Commander needs to be informed,” someone said, low, urgent, the kind of voice that wanted to sound calm and wasn’t managing it. “Immediately. This changes everything.”

It changes nothing that matters, Sair said, and I felt the words arrive in my mind at the same moment I heard the low rumble of them in my chest, like a second voice living just behind my own thoughts. It only changes what they thought they knew.

I didn’t say anything back. I wasn’t sure yet if I could speak to Sair without speaking out loud, and I definitely wasn’t ready to find out in front of fifty armed soldiers and whatever was left of the crowd, most of whom were still frozen at the edges of the square like they’d wandered into the wrong painting.

“Can you stand?” I asked instead, quietly, mostly because it felt strange to be the one asking that question to a creature roughly the size of a house.

Barely. But I will.

Sair’s wings, folded tight against that massive grey body, shifted with a sound like canvas snapping in wind. The movement alone seemed to cost something. I felt it, actually felt it, a kind of dragging exhaustion that wasn’t mine settling over my shoulders like a wet cloak. My knees wobbled. I hadn’t expected that. Nobody had explained to me, because nobody had ever expected to need to explain it to me, that whatever happened to Sair, I would feel too.

“You’re hurting,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

I have been hurting for a long time. You get used to it. A pause. Or you don’t, and you pretend you have. It is much the same.

The Warden captain finally found her voice again, though she kept a careful distance. “Girl. What’s your name?”

“Mira.” I said it automatically, the way you answer when someone in authority asks you something, even though every instinct in me was screaming that I should probably be more careful about who I told things to right now.

“Mira what?”

“Just Mira.” It was true. I’d never had a family name, not one anyone had bothered giving me anyway. At the healing hall I was just Mira, the apprentice, the girl who fetched things.

The captain’s expression did something complicated, somewhere between disbelief and calculation, like she was trying to fit me into a story that made sense and finding that I didn’t fit anywhere at all. “And you’re bonded. To that.”

“I think so.” I looked at Sair. “Are we?”

Yes. The word came with something warm underneath it, something that felt almost like amusement, if amusement could also feel exhausted. Very thoroughly, I’m afraid. There is no version of today where this does not happen, Mira. Believe me. I have had a long time to consider the alternatives.

I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t have time to ask, because the captain was already turning to one of her soldiers, murmuring something about the palace, about reporting this before anyone else did, about how Commander Veth would want to see this immediately. The word immediately kept coming up, and I was starting to understand that whatever had just happened to me in the middle of a public square was not going to stay a small, private thing for very long.

“Wait,” I said, and to my own surprise, my voice came out steady. “I need to go back. I work at the healing hall. Master Doran will want to know where I am.”

The captain actually laughed, a short, disbelieving bark. “The healing hall. You just bonded one of the oldest dragons in the realm in front of half the city, and you’re worried about your master wondering where you are.”

“He’ll worry,” I said simply, because it was true, and because right now it was the only true thing I had to hold onto. Everything else, the dragon, the bond, the soldiers, the crowd, all of it felt like it belonged to someone else’s life that had been dropped on top of mine without warning. But Doran worrying about me, that was familiar. That made sense.

She is right to want this, Sair said, and this time the words were quieter, almost private, like they were meant only for me even though I suspected the captain could hear some version of them too, judging by the way her eyes widened slightly. Let her have a little more time as herself, before the world decides who she has to become instead. It costs you nothing.

The captain studied Sair for a long moment, then looked back at me, and something in her face shifted, not quite kindness, but something close to it. “Fine. But you’re not walking through the city alone, not now. Half of Caldreth just watched a dragon bond with a healer’s apprentice. People are going to react to that, and not all of them well.”

She assigned two soldiers to walk with me, which felt absurd, like being given an honor guard for a trip to fetch bandages. Sair couldn’t come, not into the narrow streets, not yet, not until the Wardens figured out where to even put a creature that size. The thought of leaving Sair behind, even for an hour, sent a fresh wave of something through my chest, sharp and unexpected, like a thread pulling taut.

I will be here, Sair said, sensing it before I’d even fully felt it myself. I am not going anywhere. I have nowhere left to go, and nothing left to lose by waiting. Go. Tell your Master Doran you are late, and that you have a very good excuse.

That almost made me laugh, despite everything. Almost.

The walk back to the healing hall took twice as long as usual, partly because of the crowds still gathering in every street, drawn by rumors that were clearly outpacing the truth, and partly because every step away from the square felt heavier than the last, like I was dragging something invisible behind me. I kept glancing back, even after the dragon was long out of sight, and each time I felt that thread in my chest tug gently, reassuring, still here, still here.

By the time the healing hall came into view, familiar and small and smelling faintly of mint even from outside, I realized my hands were shaking. Not from fear, exactly. From the sheer impossible size of what had just happened, finally catching up to me, one slow heartbeat at a time.

Doran was waiting in the doorway, arms crossed, his expression somewhere between irritation and something far more careful.

“Mira,” he said slowly. “We need to talk.”