Artem breathed deep.His huge lungs burned with the change in air temperature. The smells of the ground — the sharp bite of pine, the satisfying burn of smoke mingling with the crisp scent of cold mountain water — were at once familiar and strange. He couldn’t rightly recall when he’d smelled them last. Had it been weeks? Months?
His mind was muddied. Thoughts that had once flowed with the clarity of the river far below now swirled in dark eddies. He wasn’t insane. His reason, his identity, remained. Artem was fully aware of what had happened to him: the roaming sickness had taken his ingrained sense of direction and turned it against him.
All dragons felt the instinctive urge to find a roost of their own — a high place that afforded them a view of their territory, that they could fortify and fill with a mate and offspring. It was deeply embedded in the same part of their brains that controlled their sense of direction, which was itself attuned to the magnetic field that encircled the Earth.
It wasn’t abnormal for a dragon to fly from the family roost on the cusp of adulthood, compelled by those twining instincts to find their own direction, their own place. But occasionally, that compulsion went into overdrive.
Artem wasn’t a boy. He was nearly seventy, and he’d never had a problem with his roaming instinct before. When he felt stifled by life in his clan’s stronghold on Drummond Island, he flew. Usually, he returned to his clan after a few weeks of bitter cold flight, his instincts settled once more.
Not this time, though.
When he set out from the Dragon Roost after a raucous dinner with his cousins to celebrate his little sister’s completion of her mandatory military service, he didn’t feel any different than normal. A fearless launch off of his balcony, a mid-air shift, and he was off, wings outstretched to catch the air.
But time blurred after that. At some point, he’d lost track of it altogether. The need to go was a slow, steady drumbeat in his mind, drowning out every other need. It usually faded quietly into the background after a few days of hard flight, but as the days passed, Artem felt it only grow stronger.
Go. Find a roost. Go. Find a roost. Go! Find a roost!
The mantra circled endlessly, pushing out every other thought or base need. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate, or slept. By the time he began to circle the snow-topped peaks of the Sierras, he could barely hold his wings up to catch the air.
Dragons were made to fly for weeks on end, their bodies built to go long distances with neither rest nor sustenance, but Artem knew the roaming sickness had pushed him beyond his body’s limits. He had to land. If he didn’t, he would eventually fall — the most humiliating death a dragon could imagine.
It didn’t matter that he was aware enough to understand landing would spell his death. Rogue dragons were dangerous and prone to bouts of territorial rage. Even his own clan would have used force to subdue him in his current state. The fact that he was in elf territory meant there would be no mercy. They would not subdue him and try to beat the sickness out of him, as his clan would. As soon as he touched down, his life would end.
Desperate, hungry, and exhausted, Artem was barely coherent enough to feel the grief of his reality. It was there, a shadow pressing against the edges of his mind, but unable to reach him. All he knew was the pain in his exhausted wings. The ache of his empty belly. The relentless pounding in his head.
The lonely, broken call of his soul. Go. Find a roost.
Home,his instincts urged. Find a home.
That might have been possible in the Draakonriik. He could have found a roost there, perhaps on a craggy peak of the Smoky Mountains, where he could build a fine roost for himself and his Chosen. But with his sense of direction so snarled in instinct, he’d veered far off course and into the Elvish Protectorate. If he picked a roost there, without first getting the proper permissions from the EVP government, he would be shot on sight.
No one wanted a rogue dragon in their territory, after all.
Too bad he didn’t have the strength to haul himself back across the continent. At the rate he was going, Artem would either land in the Sierras or he would fall into them.
What was more humiliating: falling from the sky or having a bolt put through his brain?
No self-respecting dragon would accept either. Dragons were meant to die one of two ways — in combat or in the arms of their Chosen at a ripe old age, with offspring flourishing in the world, carrying on his clan’s legacy. Falling from the sky was a humiliation akin to slipping and dying in a godsdamned shower. An elf putting a plasma bolt in his brain was only half a step up from that. Neither was acceptable to a dragon such as Artem, a man in his prime and cousin of the greatest dragon alive, Taevas Aždaja.
The choice loomed larger in his head as he circled the icy peaks of the Sierras, his instinct fixating on the jagged shapes of granite cliffs and sharp, brittle pine trees far below. As night fell, his wings shuddered, pain lancing up through the nerves and delicate muscle as he fought to maintain his altitude.
It was no use. He was falling. Instinct might have compelled him to cross whole oceans, but that didn’t mean his body could actually do so. A dragon was the most powerful creature on Burden’s Earth, but even they needed rest.
The flicker of dragonfire in the distance was… Artem didn’t have a word to describe the relief he felt when he spotted it. Not once did he think of rescue, of help. He thought only of ending his torment.
No dragon who roosted in this high paradise would suffer a rogue to land in its territory. No dragon would ask questions first. They would simply act. If a rogue dropped out of the sky to threaten their roost, they would defend it with tooth and claw.
Better to die that way than to hit the ground like a diseased bird. It was the first clear thought he’d had that day.
Artem pushed himself forward, toward the beacon of dragonfire that should have warned him away, not drawn him closer. No sane creature would approach another dragon’s roost uninvited — especially one who clearly had a Chosen. As he swept down into the gorge below the roost, Artem could smell the sweet fragrance of a woman on the frigid air.
Human, his exhausted mind supplied. Yes, this was exactly what he needed. A dragon with a human mate would be even more vicious. Humans were so very fragile, lacking in sharp teeth or claws or a protective dual form. The dragons he knew with human mates were nearly driven to madness with the protective urge to coddle them.
It worked perfectly for Artem, who had no intention of dying a sad, whimpering death.
To die under another dragon’s claws was vastly preferable to a rabid animal’s execution. And if he felt a sharp twang of envy in his scaled breast for this lucky creature, with such a fine roost and a mate to safekeep, Artem didn’t dwell on it. His chance to have both went out the window the moment the sickness pushed him out of the Draakonriik.
Still, he sucked in a burning breath when he swooped up and over the deck of the dwelling that clung to the cliffside. The woman’s scent was thick around the roost. It cut through the sharp pine and the scent of burning wood to sear a path down his throat.