The Last Flight

Flying is the best thing there is.

I realize that's a strong claim. I've lived for three centuries and experienced a great many things, including an entire decade spent sleeping on a pile of emeralds the size of a horse, which is exactly as magnificent as it sounds. I've watched storms roll across mountain ranges like enormous grey cats, I've heated my own bathwater with my breath, and I once ate an entire flock of sheep in a single afternoon, which I mention not because I'm proud of it but because it's relevant context for how good flying has to be to beat all of that.

It's better. It's better than everything.

The wind is under my wings and the sky is wide and empty and mine, and I'm riding a thermal up from the valley floor with my eyes half-closed, feeling the air currents shift against my scales like a language I've spoken since before these humans were building with stone. The sun is warm on my back. A flock of geese veers sharply out of my path (wise decision, honestly, full marks for self-preservation) and I watch them reform their little arrow shape at a distance they consider safe.

It's not safe. I could catch them easily. But I ate a very satisfying deer two days ago and I'm not hungry, and besides, there's something almost endearing about the way geese commit to their formations. Very organized. Very pointless. Very human, now that I think about it.

My wings are stretched to their full span, which, I'll admit, is not the most impressive span in dragon history. The massive ones were hunted out first. Trophy dragons, my mother called them, with a delicate sniff of disdain that could have wilted flowers at forty paces. Size invites attention, dear. Cleverness invites longevity.

She was right. I'm still here.

I'm just not sure who else is.

That thought tries to settle on me like a barb between my scales, and I tilt into a long banking turn to shake it off. I've been flying for how long now? Three seasons? Four? The days blur when you're searching for something you're increasingly afraid doesn't exist. I checked the Thornback Mountains first, because my cousin Ashgravel always said the caves there were magnificent, but that was also two centuries ago and Ashgravel was prone to exaggeration. She once described a hoard of copper pennies as "a river of sunset metal." It was fourteen pennies. In a puddle.

The caves were empty. So were the Greymist Peaks, the Saltwind Coast, and a very promising volcanic island that turned out to contain nothing but seabirds and an alarming amount of bird excrement.

I left my hoard for this. My hoard. Do you have any idea what it costs a dragon to leave her hoard? It's like asking a river to leave its bed. It's like asking fire to stop being warm. My hoard is four hundred years of carefully curated beauty: gold coins from seventeen kingdoms (three of which no longer exist, which only increases the value), a sapphire the size of a duck egg, an absolutely exquisite silver hand mirror I took from a duchess who shouldn't have left her window open if she didn't want dragons admiring her taste in accessories, and a truly unreasonable number of rings. I love rings. Humans make them in such clever sizes. I used to line them up on the tip of a single claw and watch them catch the firelight, each one a tiny perfect circle of someone thought this was worth making, and that might be what I love most about treasure. Someone made it. Someone poured skill and hours and care into shaping metal into something beautiful for no reason other than beauty itself.

I left all of it. For this. For empty sky and no answers and the growing, gnawing, thoroughly unwelcome suspicion that I am flying through a world that has no more dragons in it.

But the flying. The flying is still very good.

I bank south over a river that sparkles in the afternoon light (pretty, but it's no sapphire) and that's when I smell it.

Gold.

Not raw ore. Not the dull, muddy scent of unworked metal still tangled up with rock. This is refined gold. Worked gold. The kind that's been melted and poured and shaped by clever hands, and it's not just a scent, it's a sound, almost, a high clear hum at the edge of hearing, the way metal sings when it remembers being made. The kind that sits in vaults and on fingers and in the locked drawers of merchants who think a wooden box is adequate protection for something so beautiful. (It isn't. Nothing is adequate protection from a dragon who's caught the scent. Except, apparently, the dragon's own stubbornness.)

The smell wraps around my ribs and pulls. Every scale on my body tightens. My wings want to fold. My whole being says down, down, go down, take it, hoard it, love it, keep it.

I keep flying.

This is the most unnatural thing I've ever done, and I have recently flown through a lightning storm on purpose because I thought I saw a wing shape in the clouds. (It was a cloud. It was always a cloud.) But ignoring gold-scent is worse than that, because the lightning storm was just dangerous. This is a betrayal of every instinct I have. My scales are practically vibrating. My talons are clenched. If I were a less disciplined dragon (and I am an extremely disciplined dragon, thank you, I once sat on a mountaintop for six years without moving because the sunset was particularly good) I would already be halfway down with my claws extended and a song in my heart.

But no. I have a mission. I have purpose. I have given up my own hoard, my beautiful, irreplaceable, deeply beloved hoard, and I will not be seduced by someone else's provincial gold collection.

The scent gets stronger. There are gems underneath it. I can smell those too, a bright sharp note like cold stars. And silver. And copper, warm and homely. And something I can't quite identify, something old and strange, but I'm ignoring all of it because I made a choice. I left my hoard to look for my kind, and I am not going to be distracted by some human town's treasury just because my entire body is screaming at me to dive.

I'm not.

I am not.

...The gems smell really good, though.

The town.

There's a town down there.

I peer over my wing with one eye. It's a charming enough place, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing. Stone buildings, thatched roofs, a market square with a weathered fountain that's more moss than stone. Gardens spilling flowers over walls in a disorganized riot that suggests the flowers have made their own decisions about where to grow and the humans have wisely decided not to argue. Green hills rolling away in every direction like a quilt some giant kicked off in her sleep. Very picturesque. Very human. Very much the kind of place that stores its gold in a building with a lock and thinks that solves the problem.

I find myself descending. Not for the gold. Just... curiosity. I've been flying over farmland and forest for weeks and this is the first settlement of any real size, and it has a forge (I can smell the hot metal, singing a lower note than the gold, a deep warm hum like a voice I almost recognize), and a bakery (I can smell that too, and something about the scent is unexpectedly compelling, warm and round and golden in a way that has nothing to do with actual gold), and people. Lots of people. Moving through their little streets like ants with better hats.

I drop lower. I'm genuinely just looking. In three centuries, I have burned exactly one settlement, and it was an accident (I sneezed) and I felt terrible about it afterward and left them two gold bars as an apology, which I think was more than fair. I am not a dangerous dragon. I am a curious dragon, and there is a difference, and I wish someone would explain that to the people who are currently ringing every bell in town.

Because the bells have started.

Oh, for the love of fire and sky.

They've spotted me. Of course they've spotted me. I'm a dragon flying over their town in broad daylight; I'm not exactly built for subtlety. And now there's shouting. And running. And someone is ringing a bell with an enthusiasm that suggests they've been practicing for this moment their entire life. And yes, there it is. The arrows.

Again.

I pull up, beating hard for altitude, and something between a sigh and a growl rumbles through my chest. I breathe out a small, exasperated puff of flame, not at anyone, just into the open air, the way a human might mutter under their breath, and the screaming from below gets significantly worse.

This is the fundamental problem with humans. I'm not attacking. I'm flying. Flying is not an act of aggression. It's an act of existing. And the fire thing. I really wish someone would explain to humans about the fire thing. It's involuntary. It's a stress response. You startle a dragon, she puffs a little flame. It's like sneezing. It's like sweating. Getting angry at a dragon for breathing fire is like getting angry at a human for... actually, I don't know what humans do involuntarily. Blink? Trip over things? Fall in love with inappropriate people? I've observed them doing all three with remarkable frequency.

But every time a dragon passes over a human settlement, it's arrows and bells and screaming and some hero on the wall who's been waiting his entire life for this moment. And then they write songs about it. I've heard the songs. They are not flattering. In one of them, the dragon is described as "a worm of terrible countenance." A worm. I have four legs, two wings, and a tail that could shatter stone. I am no one's worm.

A bolt from a crossbow clangs off my left haunch and I am briefly so offended that I consider, just for a moment, circling back and explaining to them in very small words that I was passing through and they are being extremely rude.

But I don't. Because I am looking for dragons, not arguments, and because the last time I tried to explain myself to humans it went poorly for a barn.

The arrows are laughable, mostly. They ping off my scales like hailstones. I'm not large, as dragons go, but I am still a dragon, and my scales have turned aside much more impressive projectiles than these.

Oh.

Something punches through my chest.

Not a metaphor. Not a feeling. An arrow, slim and iron-tipped, has slipped between two scales above my heart with the kind of precision that shouldn't be possible from the ground at this angle in this wind. One in a million. One in ten million. The kind of shot that ballads are written about, except the ballad would be about the very lucky man on the wall and not about the very unlucky dragon who was minding her own business.

I should be furious. I should be breathing fire on this entire ridiculous town and their stupid bells and their absurdly talented archer. Instead, the thought that forms, my last thought, possibly, the last thought of the last dragon in the world, which really ought to be something grand and significant and worthy of three centuries of living...

...the thought is: Well, that's annoying.

The sky tilts. My wings won't hold. The town is coming up fast and the wind isn't under me anymore, it's around me, everywhere, not holding but pushing, and I have a brief, indignant moment of thinking that gravity has absolutely no right to treat a dragon this way before —

I hit the ground.

The impact drives the arrow deeper and my vision goes red, then gold, then dim around the edges. I can feel grass under my scales and it's wet and cold and deeply undignified. I am dying in a field outside a town whose name I don't even know because one very lucky human made one very lucky shot, and this is not how this was supposed to go. I was supposed to find the others. I was supposed to find my mother, or my cousins, or at least one other dragon who could confirm that I'm not the last ridiculous remnant of a species too beautiful for this world to deserve.

I can hear footsteps. Humans, approaching carefully, the way they approach things they've killed but aren't entirely sure are dead. Smart, actually. I'd respect it if I weren't currently the dead thing in question.

Something warm trickles down my scales. Blood, probably. Dragon blood. I don't know what color it is. I've never bled before. That seems like the kind of thing I should have experienced at least once in three centuries, but here we are, learning new things at the very end. How educational. How completely irritating.

The edges of my vision are going dark. The gold-scent from the town drifts over me like a lullaby, and I think: of all the things to smell while dying, at least it's something beautiful.

Then light.

Not sunlight. Not firelight. Something else. Something that feels like being pulled inside out and wrapped in wool and set on fire all at the same time. Hands, human hands, small and firm, press against my scales, and magic I don't recognize pours into me like a river reversing course.

I try to say What are you doing but what comes out is a sound I've never made before, something between a roar and a whimper, and the light gets brighter, and the hands press harder, and the last thing I hear before everything changes is a voice, calm, kind, slightly out of breath, saying:

"Hold on. This is going to be very strange."

He is not wrong.