Pt. XII

She had not moved since this stranger, this vision, vanished. The tribe slept, their breaths slow and deep in the caves around, their dreams untroubled by the weight of what she now carried. The galaxies wheeled above her, indifferent and eternal. She had spent lifetimes reading their patterns, searching for meaning in their slow, celestial dance. But meaning, she realized, was not something given. It was something taken.
She lifted a claw, tracing the deepest groove in the nearest slab: the first mark she had ever made here, the day she claimed this place as her own. The stone had made her bleed for it then, resisting her claws, her will. Now, it yielded without protest. She had become what the slabs demanded: a vessel of memory, a keeper of time.
But time was not a line. It was a circle.
And she was trapped in its curve.

She had spent centuries believing her return was a test. A punishment. A second chance to prove herself worthy of the life she had lost. But the stranger’s words had cracked that belief like ice on a thawing lake.

Why was she brought back?
Not to atone. Not to serve. Not even to remember.
But to choose.
The realization coiled in her chest, a living thing, restless and hungry. She had spent so long carving the stories of others that she had forgotten her own still had pages left unturned.

She spread her wings, the membranes catching the moonlight like sails. The wind rushed over her, carrying the scent of pine and distant rain. She could leave. Right now. She could vanish into the sky and never look back. The tribe would survive. They had the slabs. They had their own stories.

But the slabs would not have her.
And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it?

She was not just a Chronicler. She was Akir’Ischa. The dragoness who had loved, who had lost, who had raged and wept and clawed her way back from the edge of oblivion. The one who had stood before eight kin and been sent back with a purpose she had never dared to name.

The stranger had not given her an answer. He had given her a mirror.
And in its reflection, she saw the truth:
She had been waiting for the stars to speak.
But they had been waiting for her.

She turned her gaze upward, to the moons, to the spiral of the galaxy that had watched over her since her first breath. And then she asked.
Not with words. Not with a roar.
But with the only thing she had left that was truly hers:

Her name.
Akir’Ischa

She pressed her forehead to the cold stone, her breath warm against its surface. And then, slowly, deliberately, she carved a single, new mark into the slab: not a story, not a lesson, but a promise.
A line, curving upward like a wing in flight.

The stone shuddered.
Not from her claws. Not from the wind.
From within.

A deep, resonant pulse throbbed beneath her talons, as if the slab itself had a heartbeat. The mark she had made glowed, a faint, silver light seeping from the groove like liquid starlight. The glow spread, tracing the veins of the stone, illuminating the stories she had carved over the centuries.

The slabs spoke.
Not in words. Not in the voices of the past.
But in images, unfolding in her mind like the petals of a flower:
Her hatchlings, not as they had been in death, but as they would have been: grown, strong, their scales shimmering with the fire of her line. One of them a deep black, a female with eyes like her mate’s, stood at the edge of a cliff, wings outstretched, gazing at the stars. Waiting.

Her valley, not barren, not cursed, but alive; lush and green, with eight dragons of different colors gathering beneath the moons. And at its heart, a slab of black stone, smooth and unmarked, waiting.

Herself, but not as she was now. Older. Wiser. Standing between two pillars of light, her claws resting on the shoulders of two dragons, one young, one ancient. Bridging.

And then, the final vision:
A choice.
Two paths, diverging like the tines of a forked river.
One led back: to the slabs, to the tribe, to the slow, steady work of carving the future into stone.
The other led forward: to the stars, to the unknown, to a destiny that was hers and hers alone.

The slabs did not demand she pick.
They only asked that she see.
She opened her eyes and understood, then.

She could not abandon the tribe. Their stories were part of her, as her story was part of them. But she could not chain herself to the slabs forever, either. The stars had not brought her back to be a prisoner of memory.
They had brought her back to live.
She rose, her wings unfolding without a sound. The glow in the slabs faded, but the mark remained. A silver scar in the stone, the first of its kind.

She would not leave tonight.
But she would leave.
Not in flight, not in fear, but in purpose.

She would teach the tribe what she had learned: that history was not just something to be recorded. It was something to be lived. A new Chronicler would rise, one who understood that the slabs were not a cage, but a door.

And then?
Then, she would take to the sky.
Not as a fugitive. Not as a mourner.

But as a dragoness who had loved, lost, raged, remembered. And now, at last, chosen.