Pt. XV
The slabs were silent.
The tribe slept.
And the stars…
The stars burned.
She stood at the highest peak of the sacred ridge, where the wind howled like a chorus of the dead and the air was thin enough to taste the void beyond. Below her, the territories of her kin stretched like a living tapestry, threaded with light and shadow.
The slabs, her burden and her sanctuary, gleamed dully in the moonlight, their surfaces etched with the weight of centuries. The role of Chronicler had never been meant to be a chain. It was a fire, passed from dragon to dragon until the flame grew too bright for scales to withstand.
And hers had become a wildfire.
She unfurled her wings, the membranes catching the starlight like sails filled with celestial wind.
The slabs would endure. The tribe would write their own stories now.
She had one last tale to carve.
Not in stone.
But in the sky.
She had spent the night in vigil, her claws pressed to the earth, her mind tracing the constellations as they wheeled above her. The red moon hung low, its light painting the world in hues of blood and ember. She knew the stories: the ones that spoke of dragons who had tried to touch the heavens. Many had failed.
But those stories existed for a reason, it means they have happened. And many had not been chosen.
She had.
The stranger’s voice echoed in her memory: “The stars hold the future.”
She would claim it.
She leapt.
Not upward.
Through.
Her wings did not beat. Her body did not strain.
She fell into the sky, as if the heavens themselves had opened like a maw to swallow her whole.
The world below receded. Not in distance, but in meaning.
The valley became a smudge of green and gold. The slabs became grains of sand. The tribe became specks of light, flickering like embers in the dark.
And then;
The stars spoke.
Not in words. Not in visions.
But in fire.
Fire bloomed along her scales, not from within, but from without, as if the cosmos itself had reached down to forge her anew. Her wings stretched, not in pain, but in recognition. Her bones hummed with the song of the spheres. Her breath became the wind.
She was no longer flesh.
She was memory given form.
When the burning ceased, she was whole and yet, more.
Her scales were the black of the space between stars. Her eyes held galaxies. Her wings, when she spread them, cast no shadow, for she was the light that made shadows possible.
Below her, the world turned.
She saw herself -or what she had been- a dragoness of bone and blood, laying at the edge of the slabs, her claws pressed to the silver mark.
And then she saw forward.
A hatchling, not yet born, with scales like her mate’s and eyes like the sunset. A storm, gathering over a valley that had not yet earned its name. A slab, white and unmarked, waiting for a story that had not yet been lived.
From that night on, her species looked to the sky and saw a new pattern in the heavens, a curve of blue fire where no star had burned before. Some called her the Watchful Eye. Others, the Guardian’s Wing. The youngest hatchlings swore they could hear her roar when the nights were dark.
She watched.
And she remembered.
For that was her purpose now: not to carve the past into stone, but to weave the future into the sky. She would be the silent witness, the unseen claw, the voice in the wind that whispered to those who listened
“You are not alone.”
“You were never alone.”
One final time, she turned her gaze to the slabs.
And for the first time in centuries, she spoke. Not to the stone, not to the stars, but to the dragoness she had been, laying frozen in the past, her claws bloodied, her heart breaking.
“You thought you were running from grief,” she said. “But you were running toward this. Toward me. Toward the truth that some stories do not end—they simply become. Now rest, little one. I will carry you from here.”
And then she turned her back on the planet and took her place among the stars.