The gentle cadence of her voice was overwhelming. Even the heat of her skin and the flicker of gold in her eyes felt almost surreal, barely there… Yet, she was incredibly and irreplaceably real. However, my celebration was cruelly short-lived. I’d wanted more than the few slow moments of greeting to share with the DragonHeart, but it was not something that fate felt the need to be granted. Resplendence had done her part in allowing me the opportunity to rekindle my feeling of friendship for the ghostly figure that was Mirage, but Kaj did little more than taint it. His presence was not one I openly welcomed and when he landed some yards away, I was quick to turn my back to him, as childish and futile as it seemed. Things had not yet been righted between us… and the tension hardly went unnoticed.

Welcome home Mirage.

As I contemplated the mists that had come to greet their former Queen, I began to feel quite selfish for making this moment about anything other than the dragon mare herself. This was not how I’d anticipated her return… not at all. However, the deeply unsettled strings of my heart could not let the Storm Bringer reside unacknowledged. After all, he had chosen to stand back and away from the creatures he was due to call family. Did that mean nothing to him now or was the pressure simply crushing him, bending him to insanity’s will? Were I a more righteous man, I would have overlooked the stallion’s follies, but we had gotten off on the wrong foot and could not seem to balance out our differences. His insecurities were stifling and his pride had all but smothered him… but, at times like these I was almost compelled to sympathize with him. After all, I had once been in his shoes and suffered those same woes. Could I not find it within my heart to forgive and forget, let bygones be bygones?


Maybe I’d gone mad with the sudden changes throughout the Edge or maybe I’d just grown tired of the endless bickering, but in a solitary moment of weakness, I moved aside. It was a quiet gesture and one that was born merely from remembering what Mirage had taught me about leadership. I had not been acting like a leader by any means over the past few months, I’d only succumbed to the actions of a wounded coward. It had to stop. Kaj had come to remember just as I and he deserved this moment just like any other.

Before I could anymore deliberate my issues with the reigning King, I was attracted by the slanted lilt of a tune all too familiar to me now. Formality was now a thing of the past and Mirage moved quickly from apology toward explanation, her tales coming to fruition just as violently as I had imagined. Truthfully I’d known little of her brothers, but the way the world had taken them was much too cruel for even Mirage to have beheld… However, that was not the end of her nightmare, not even close. My shoulders seemed to sag as she continued with her experience, simply thriving within the ominous depths of the universe, and finding no remorse from the ones she’d once worshipped. I’d never heard anything like it and therefore could not understand… I couldn’t even convince myself to soothe her now, because there was truly nothing that I could have said that would have made any of it better. Mirage was here now though… wasn’t that enough? She had survived a grueling test of her faith and somehow lived to relay her strength to others.

Now that I studied her and the way her aging bones appeared to swell against the tautness of her skin… it was painful. She had once been the vision of beauty and grace and devotion to her family and she had returned looking for solace. I would never turn her away and never ignore her pleas for comfort and justice. But I was afraid… I was afraid that Kaj would receive her just as he had his former King. I feared that he would resent her return, no matter how open her heart appeared. I blinked against the melancholy that scorched my eyes and chose to look away from it all. I had to find myself again in the shady forests just beyond or at the cliff overlooking the sea, for this was the land that had raised me and nurtured me… In truth, I only feared that time had changed us all too much. We had grown apart and now was the time that we needed to come back together.

“Please stay,” I answered quietly while glancing at Kaj. I needed him just as much as he needed me, but we both knew that despite everything, we also needed Mirage.

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