Art by Neverr ♥

but somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin' dreams

Someone else had once made the mistake of believing that a child was the sum of their parents, nothing more, nothing less. Their voice grated in his memory still, the words lost to the ages, but it had been something about birthright or blood right, that age-old sentiment that just because your mother and/or father had been good enough for something, you, too, were. By right of blood. By right of having had no say whatsoever in whose vagina you emerged from.

Ironically, the argument had begun in the other end. Mauja had been a creature of darkness and anger, cold death and regret. He'd been looking for things to hate beside himself, and somebody had offered him a blindfold.

Well, actually, he'd been looking for justice but it had turned to massacre, and he'd had the good sense to get out of there before the bloodied scythes came for him, too.

He'd taken the blindfold with him, though. Why or how, he couldn't say, but he supposed it had been a soothing balm for the festering scab in his soul. He'd found something, cool as ice when he plunged his mind into it. Soothing, indeed. It had given him grace from his thoughts.

But only fools stayed blind, and no matter how hard he tried, Mauja was no fool.

The scent of mixed blood had been affront to him, though he was pretty sure you couldn't smell mixed blood that properly, but maybe you could. It wasn't unusual to be surprised, like how Ophelia suddenly waltzed around with a dragon.

Ah, fuck—after all these years...

The point he was trying to get to, as he ambled among the trees towards the dragonmare who had crossed his mind earlier, was that Mauja, who had dreamed of a world filled only with unicorns, hadn't found it in himself to hate those of mixed blood. He'd looked within himself, for the supply of seemingly endless contempt and ambition, and found that his rationality had defied the hating of them. They might be abominations, but through no fault of their own; they were as much responsible for their tainted blood as a child was equal to its parent.

Which is to say, not at all.

And that was why Mauja had found himself in love with a hybrid, even before he'd—sort of—come clean for the world. Which he hadn't. Because he was a coward. Because, some part of him still lived in a world eight years gone, and thought everyone remembered him as that smiling King who kept a suspiciously clean herd. And since he didn't do that anymore, he had the bad habit of assuming they guessed he'd changed.

Helovia had attributed dreams of conquest to him before he'd had them himself. He'd been too cautious, and he'd had his ass kicked over it.

Did he regret it? No, not really. He wanted to say he'd just been stalling for time, to get over himself, but that was lying. At the time, he had genuinely believed his race superior, or at the very least, not so disgusting.

He was closer now. He could make out the sheen of sweat, the dull look of the scales, like unpolished gold—not sickly, just dusty. It was the lack of light, he figured. The dragon on her withers looked much the same, fine metal left in the dark.

His mind looped back to the beginning. She was the daughter of the usurper, the selfish queen, the one Mauja had wasted years on hating because, again, it was easier than hating himself, but he was short on options these days. Aside from her moment of youthful arrogance and pride—which, in truth, had mostly been fueled by that other nameless voice in his memory—it was not her fault that she was the progeny of a mare Mauja disliked and a dragon-creature who had done his best to make him even more intimate with fire.

He limped closer. Irma didn't want him to. Probably the dragon. Neither of them liked dragons. Least of all since Torasin died for it.

Her name still escaped him, and he did not want to greet her as the child of one dead and one lost, because she was more than that. Just like everyone else was more than the sum of their parents.

And besides, he still had a hard time saying Mirage's name and not having it go sour upon his tongue.

And, a second besides, she was crying. She didn't look sad, so much as she looked lost and exhausted, but the crystalline tears poured from her golden eyes. It looked like she wasn't aware of it. It looked like she wasn't aware of much, not even his slow, pained approach—she might've been seeing through him, or something else entirely. Ghosts. Different worlds. Past times. He sighed. Part of him wanted to skirt around her and keep his silent vigil in solitude, but if she suddenly snapped to, it would seem terribly rude if he was avoiding her.

Hah. Since when had he cared, honestly? (He's been asking himself that for years, and the truth is, he always did.) And why should he care about her, in particular? He'd already established that she was not her mother, nor her father, which left her only a stranger—and he didn't have the energy to care for strangers, because they were usually rude, stupid, dumb, obnoxious, annoying, or all of it.

In the end, he figured it was that look on her face—like a lost and kicked puppy abandoned in a box by the highway, feeling the rain coming but not sure what it'd be like.

Godawful.

He felt it too, the way the world had been profoundly altered, and yet it looked practically the same. He heaved another mist-ridden sigh, and his slow, halting approach had reached its end. He swayed to a grateful stop next to her, body burning, legs trembling; it took all he had not to fold in on himself and collapse.

"Storm's coming," he said quietly; the gentle hush of waves and the gray clouds told it was not a physical one.

The whole world was holding its breath, waiting.