Elegy for a Lost Star

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Book: Read Elegy for a Lost Star for Free Online
Authors: Elizabeth Haydon
disappeared into the mist from whence he had come.
    The Death scale went dark.
    Faron’s eyes closed as the heat of the day returned.
    Not for me
, the creature thought in its semiconscious mind.
I not die now
.
    A single caustic tear welled beneath a heavily veined eyelid and burned as it fell.
    T he snow muted the sun’s light as it hung over the edge of the world, pausing as if reconsidering its descent.
    With the last measure of her strength, the beast pulled herself up from the chasm, over the ice-covered battlements that scored the mountaintop in wide, frozen rings, to rest on the flat, cold ground outside the walls.
    The word that had been driving her on, inspiring her to fight off thesleep that hovered on the edge of her consciousness and the numbness of her limbs, echoed in her brain, growing louder as she climbed.
    Home
.
    She stopped and wearily inclined her head, her three-chambered heart thudding loudly.
    Above her in the snowy air a castle reached to the clouds, formed of marble that had long ago been coated with so much ice as to appear chiseled from it. The three towers loomed above her in haughty splendor, unchallenged in the winter sky.
    Home. Home. Home
.
    The dragon’s eyes opened slowly, widely, the vertical pupils that scored the searing blue iris contracting in the last of the afternoon light, drinking in the sight of the vast fortress and with the sight, the memory of it.
    In her foggy mind the pieces of those memories were scattered in the dark corners, confused. Slowly, however, they seemed to crawl together and form a clearer picture.
    The first memory that returned was an old one, the sight of the castle as she had first beheld it in her exile. She had come to believe she might have been a queen at one time, or a woman of some kind of import, because even as she had been walked to the edge of the icy slopes by someone whose face had not yet come into the picture, even as he had turned and left her in the blinding snow, alone for all time, her back had remained straight, her head unbowed.
    As the wyrm stared up at the frost-covered crenulations, the icy windows glazed over so thickly that sunlight would never again pass through them clearly, the towers piercing the clouds above, the images continued to return. She could now recall years of being alone in the cavernous halls that lay beyond the gates, the silence of her marble prison broken only by the echoes of her own footsteps and the crackling of the fires that burned in the mammoth hearths. Each century, each year, each day, even down to the hour came slowly back to her, her dragon blood surging with each beat of her heart, recalling the infinitesimal details as none other than a wyrm could recall, obsessing over them as none but a wyrm could obsess.
    They exiled me to this place
, she thought bitterly, an anger whose source she could still not remember burning in her blood now.
Left me alone in the cold mountains, alone with nothing but memories. And now someone has taken even those from me
.
    At that thought, another image began to form in her mind. It was of a face, a woman’s face, though she could not make it out completely. A woman with golden hair and emerald green eyes, though little else was clear.
    At the edges of the dragon’s mind, the fire of hate began to burn again. She still did not know who the woman was, or why her own caustic bloodboiled with fire at the thought of her, but she knew that the memory would return eventually.
    And when it did, she vowed that all the unspent fire, all the contained hate, would be unleashed in a thunderous fury that would rock the very foundations of the world, cracking the endless ice into hoary dust and shattering even the marble walls of the prison that was her home, her lair.
    The beast crawled on toward the castle, seeking shelter from the coming night.

4
HAGUEFORT, NAVARNE
    G wydion Navarne waited anxiously in the opulent hallway outside the doorway of the Great Hall of

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