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Annie imitates how I pace myself, how I place a fork into the steak and a knife beside it to cut, how I don’t let it grind against the plate, how I use the knife to guide peas onto my fork and place the utensils alongside one another when I’ve finished. The things you’re taught to care about, when you’re not afraid of starving. By the end, I’m sick with shame.
Lashing rain and dark fog blanket the North Sea. We’re drilling by squadron: Crissa leads the skyfish drills; Cor the stormscourge, and I the aurelian. My squadron tails one another through the rain, struggling to stay in formation through the poor visibility, and we race to break the surface of the clouds one after another. The blue sky and glaring sunlight are blinding when we burst through the last layer of rainclouds. Pallor twitches water from his wings with a snort of satisfaction; I can feel his heaving breaths through the saddle as I yank off my helmet and wipe rain from my eyes.
A stillness settles over me as I feel Aela approach, and one by one my senses confirm it: the sound of her wings; the brush of the cave-draft on my face; the sight of her amber scales glinting in the darkness as she emerges. The nerves that have been twisting my stomach all morning fall away, replaced by an awareness so clear, it is a kind of absence of thought. This is Aela. It’s time. I tighten Aela’s saddle, check her reins, and she twists her head round for one last check, finding my eyes with her slitted golden ones. I scratch the ridge of her nose and she flexes her neck back. Her
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So it becomes a struggle to peel the layers back. To probe for weakness, to expose a mistake. A performance of something intimate. These are the things I alone can find in her, and she alone can find in me.
“It’s just begun,” I answer. Can’t he see that? “This is all there is. We’re monsters, even if they call us something else.”
When I rise to leave, he seizes me, pulls me close, and hesitates. For a moment, as he stares at me with lips parted, I see the longing in his face. Longing for me. So much longing that it looks like despair. He lets out a groan so quiet it is barely audible, and with a tenderness that makes my eyes burn, he leans forward, tips my head down, and kisses me on the forehead. He quotes the Aurelian Cycle in Dragontongue. You have given life to me.
Fireborne was inspired by many sources, chief among them Virgil’s Aeneid and Plato’s Republic. I first read Virgil as a high school Latin student and remember being struck, like Annie, by the tragedy of lines that I only half understood. The translations I made then, particularly those recounting Aeneas’s flight from burning Troy, became the adaptive source for many of the lines in Fireborne attributed to the Aurelian Cycle.
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