"Heart of the Crown" Chapter 77

[seymoure]

Chapter 77

Do You Know Where Your Love Is?

Dragon love is a strange and wonderful thing.

Dragons meet once and know at that instant if this individual is the one they will spend their lives with.

Not only do they mate for life, but dragons do not outlive their mates by more than a day. They do not kill themselves they merely have invested so much of themselves in the union that there is not enough of them left to go on.

That may be one of the reasons that the species was virtually extinct. They could only have one partner and that one must be just the right one.

Morgana met Simvast when they were merely hatchlings. Neither of them was more than a decade old and just learning to fly.

Their first flight was a ballet of love that took the breath away and lit the hearts of their parents.

It was now 463 years later, and that love had not dimmed in the least.

Simvast was not given to enjoying the company of humans, but Morgana was charmed by the pale, smooth-skinned creatures. They made such cute noises when they wanted her to do something that she wanted to make them happy.

This new one, she could tell, had what so few humans they had encountered had. He had a pure heart. The infant human he carried was lucky to have such a loving guardian in him. She knew that he would die before he let anything bad happen to his little treasure.

She was rather sure that he felt the same way about his friends, and possibly her as well.

That was something very important to her, for her kind valued love above anything. They were virtually invulnerable to pain and could live thousands of years. In that time you were able to truly analyze what was of value.

Love and Sarsaparilla root were two of those things.

When Morgana awoke from some strange kind of sleep (magical, she surmised) she immediately looked for Simvast, but he was not near.

That sent her into a frenzy of searching. They had been close before this happened, and there had been no saying of farewell.

He must be near.

Then she beheld him, some forty miles away at least, hovering in the sky as though he were looking for her (instead of the other way around).

She careened in his direction, but slammed into something so hard that it almost caused her to black out.

When her senses returned, she saw nothing between her and he love, and so she set out to join with him again.

Once more she hit a barrier, but this time she had not built up so much speed, and it was not the stunning experience she had had before.

What was stunning was to realize that there was nothing there.

She reached out with her forepaw and touched a wall without image. There was not even a reflection from the sun to mark the restraint.

In the distance, it appeared that Simvast was mirroring her experience with his own invisible wall.

The two dragons brayed to one another, but there was no sound to reach their ears from their like number.

Morgana blasted the wall with flames, but when she reached out again, still it stood. It had gained no temperature from her fire either.

Simvast was racing back and forth, trying to find an end to the partition, but that, too, was hopeless.

The two beasts looked at each other with the eyes of star-crossed lovers kept apart by uncaring, warring families.

Morgana felt her heart threatening to be torn in half.

© 2008 C. Wayne Owens
Chapter 78 is here.