Kite - Chapter 2: Last to Hear the Music

In a panic, I fell backwards, wings flapping without aim, conjuring a storm of swirling embers. The gusts made the silhouette's cloak billow. Eventually the clasp was detached and it flew skyward, the hem smoldering with a dim orange glow. The man revealed was and is the man I now know as Ivan.

His face burned behind my closed eyes. Savior or condemnor I knew not. The sight was frightening enough to snap me back to reality and I felt the fresh air of the isles wash over me.

The thundering of the thousand waterfalls that gushed from the isles filled my ears. As a youngling freshly born under the canopy of the mother tree, I was taught that the water that fed the rivers, streams and falls was no ordinary water. It was made of pure energy, of magic, of pristine emotion. The mother tree, as I was taught, was the source of the fae's immortality.

I sat on my haunches, wondering where the waterfalls ended. From the isles, they just seemed to fall for an eternity. The draconic heart that beat in my chest sent shivers racing down my frame.

I was in the body of a dragon, but my true nature showed through. Soon after I was trapped in the dragon's body. It transformed, my wings taking on the semblance of that of fae's, my scales took on a bluish-white opalescence, and a blonde mane grew along my back. I was the image of the so-called fae-killer, a being capable of drinking dry the magic, emotion and immortality of a faerie, yet I was lithe and slender like the rest of my kith.

Behind my eyes, I felt a primal tug. A yearning to return to the world something it had lost. It directed me to tear apart with my very own talons what held it. Yet I was afraid... Afraid for my people.

I remember a time nearly thirteen years in the past, when the light of the floating isles was not perpetual. The fae were creatures of the light, but we had a darker side, or at least they did.

Night would rise and fall back then. Whenever it came, I hid under the roots of the mother tree as screams pierced the silence of the night. I watched in horror the events that followed.

When silence returned, I witnessed something of marvel. The skies exploded in a brilliant aurora that spanned all the floating isles. A stream of the prismatic light touched the mother tree, and the tree began to sing.

It was a wonderful melody, the creak of the branches, the rustle of the leaves falling into complete harmony that they made my soul prance. Of my people, I was the only one capable of hearing it. Of my people, I was the last fated to hear it before it vanished forever.

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