I’ll be the first to tell you what a bad idea it is, but I’ll be the last to tell you not to do it anyway.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Indrah Laruwien
Race: Dragon
Age: 98, physically about 28
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 820 words
 

---

I admit that I am one of those people who believe that mistakes need to be made. Growing up, you need to make mistakes to learn from them. I’m not saying that if I see you making the same mistake over and over again, I won’t stop you and tell you why that mistake is being made, that would be cruel. The short version of things is that if I saw my child trying to climb up a tree that I knew wasn’t safe—but a fall wouldn’t do much more than lead to possibly a few bruises—I would let them do it.

I would—and used to tell them as they were little—that it was a bad idea but, from that point on, I let them decide whether or not they truly wanted to do that thing that clearly was a bad idea. It was on them to decide if the warning was enough to keep them away from the thing that seemed so fun but could possibly—dad had to be lying, right?—be bad.

You cannot coddle a child until they are adults. Coddling them will lead to them having no life experience and no sense of what they should and shouldn’t do in life. I admit that I haven’t seen much of that here but while I was out there, when I was still young and still growing up myself, to a point, I saw plenty.

One of the other dragons I grew up near, her parents would constantly be stopping her from doing anything. She had wanted to climb up to the lookout area, they didn’t let her. She had wanted to explore the neighbouring forest, they didn’t let her. The list was endless, and they were all things that I thought were good for the soul. I was five or six years older than her, I believe, and I’d had plenty of experiences. Plenty of falls from trees, plenty of slips while trying to get up to the lookout spot.

I saw the consequences of their refusal to allow their daughter any freedom of decision possibly more than they did. They were dead-set on making sure she was safe from the world as a whole and she developed a rebellious streak that was bigger than either of them could properly handle. This was long before she had managed to learn to use her wings—that was something else they refused to teach her. Learning how to fly is one of the things we teach them as young as they possibly can learn so that they do so in a controlled environment but clearly, they didn’t want her feet to even be off the ground.

That particular thing truly worked against them.

When she was twelve or thirteen—I was seventeen and preparing to head out into that big, big world—she finally sneaked away from her parents, climbed up to our lookout point, spread her wings and jumped. I think I can spare the details of the horror that happened after that.

For those that might think I should have stopped her, I would have, had I seen her up there on the lookout point. All I’d seen was her sneaking away from the housing that her parents called their own. I wasn’t about to follow her around to see where she was going. For one thing, where she wanted to go was none of my business and, for another, I had other plans and, again, kids used to sneak out all the time at that age back home.

It’s only the following morning that I heard about what happened and yes, it was a tragedy, yes, I’m sure it could have been prevented but there was nothing left to do for the parents but to mourn her passing and let it go. I’m well aware that this makes me sound cruel but, again, I’m pretty certain that if they’d allowed her a bit more freedom to experience things as she was growing up instead of protectively keeping her from everything, this wouldn’t have happened.

If they’d taught her to spread her wings and fly when she was four or five like the rest of us, she’d have been able to glide down from the point. If they’d let her head to the point before she’d decided to sneak out, she probably wouldn’t have tried to do these two things at once while there, either. There just are countless things that had been wrong with their overly protective streak and while the price paid was very, very high, it still happened and there was no turning back that clock.

That’s why I allowed my kids—with Elva’s blessing—to do things that could be dangerous. Certainly not so dangerous as to lead them to their deaths but they learned from their mistakes, and they understood that certain things just shouldn’t be done.

I can’t delete this picture. I need it for, uh, future evidence. Okay, fine, you look super cute in it.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Indrah Laruwien
Race: Dragon
Age: 97, physically about 28
Final Word Count: 708 words
 

---

We’ve named the little one Dal. I don’t believe it truly means anything, not really, it just is a short name we both decided on because we were tired of thinking of it as, well, it. Of speaking of it as little more than it. Until it reaches a certain age, some decades down the road, we won’t be able to sex it and without knowing its sex, giving it a name was something of a difficult task. Now, at least, with a mostly neutral name, we’re getting somewhere, it feels like.

Dal has mostly seemed to get over its territorial issues. There still are some rare days when it will play the favourite card but it has become less and less common, we’re both more than a little relieved by that change in its behaviour. It was getting to be something akin to a frustration and we felt as though we were running out of options.

A few days ago, it was morning and I admit that I am usually not a morning person so I do tend to stay in bed until my brain decides it is time to get up—or Elva reminds me that my breakfast is getting cold. Not that it’s a cause for problems between us, we tend to go to sleep at different times and wake up at different times, it works for us, why change it?

On that particular morning, I admit that I’d had a hard time falling asleep the night before and I slept in late. I woke up, not to the usual quiet music from my alarm clock—which I do keep to a certain hour but tend to snooze, I’m not going to lie—but to the soft click of a camera shutter. Where she found this camera, I have no idea. She came home with it a few months ago, it is of the models that still were being sold not long before the world and humanity came to an end. I’m aware that she could turn the shutter sound off and she usually does.

By the amused look on her face, it was clear she’d put it back on, most likely hoping that it would wake me. It did. That’s the thing, I may like to laze in the morning, but I wake up really easily, I tend to be able to just roll over and go back to sleep but that’s just not always an option, no matter that I might want to.

Elva knows how much I dislike having my picture taken, she’s usually pretty good about it but as she moved out of the bedroom, still grinning away, I made to pull myself up and found that I had myself one still sleeping Dal flopped back against the side of my head. That’s not wholly unusual and Elva had mock-threatened to take a photo at one point because it was just so adorable.

Still, I got Dal off of my hair and chased after my playful mate who was claiming that she couldn’t delete the picture, she needed it for future evidence. That made me snort; I’m not going to lie. Did finally get her to admit that she just thought I was most likely ‘super cute’ in it, words we don’t use often but I suppose that it was fitting and after much bantering, I agreed to her not deleting it, so long as she didn’t show it off to anyone else. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have shown it to others but I still had to make her promise. She’s a sneaky one.

By that point, I was wide awake, going back to bed seemed pretty moot and I ended up waking Dal as I made up my side of the bed. I was grumped at by an unamused dragon and that just made me smile a little more. If I had to be woken up by the camera shutter, Dal certainly was not going to get to stay sleeping either.

Or, well, not with me. It moved from the bed, perched by a window and spent most of the rest of the day asleep as well. The life of a newly newborn dragon certainly has its perks.

Say what you want, but you’re the one who brought this upon yourself.

 
Timeline/World: Atheria – 1st Generation
Characters: Indrah Laruwien
Race: Dragon
Age: 96, physically about 28
Final Word Count: 624 words
 

---

The dark years are everyone’s little hell. I don’t know that many people who have survived through those years will have any happy memories to tell of these years. I certainly don’t, but I think it was out of choice more than anything else. I feel as though I could have shoved back against the pull away and all would have been fine.

I wasn’t gone as long as most others. We weren’t parted for more than two years, at least, as I remember it though I could be wrong. The odd thing is that I think the year we spent apart after Arianne’s death was harder on me than these two years but we hadn’t been quite as close then, I just can’t explain it.

I remember somewhat distinctly that I went to spend time with family I hadn’t really kept in touch with, during those dark years. Family that welcomed me back with wide open arms but whispered words that all of this, my wife having kicked me out—the story I fed them—had been my fault, that I’d been the one to bring that upon myself. That somehow, since I hadn’t kept a tight enough leash on her—as some dragons believe that mates should be kept on short leashes and dominated, at least in this family—it was my fault that it had all gone wrong.

In a way, I believe that it is this particular behaviour that had made me decide to go back home, to fight against the draw to stay away. I was afraid of finding our home empty but it wasn’t, thankfully not. Most of the building was empty; a few had stayed behind but without their pairs. Some had remained strong though it was clear that no pair had been left untouched, that is, of those I saw. I imagine some might have fled together. Maybe.

Nothing was easy at first, of course not. Our work was cut out for us. There still was something in the air, something that was trying to pull us apart but it was faded when compared to what it had been when the puppeteer had first done his first and laid his strings. Those strings had frayed over the edges, there had been so many that I’m sure he didn’t expect them all to hold and that is likely why I made it back home as soon as I did.

Not that any of us were aware of him or what he had done. This is knowledge that came to the surface once everyone else—or most everyone else—had returned, once Bao told us the truth of her brother. I think she imagined we would shackle her somewhere and leave her to rot but that’s just not the way of our people here and there were other, bigger matters to deal with.

The big return wasn’t as great and wonderful as it could have been. Between the elder vampire issue; something about a shooting that I just barely, vaguely remember; something about particular pairs almost wasting away to nothing because they thought their partner had died, there was a whole mess of things to waddle through but we did. We lost people, we gained people, we moved from tower to town and all in all, with the ups and downs of life, I’d like to think that this life is a very good one.

Not all days are sweet sunshine and fresh air, some are rain and storms and snow but isn’t that just one part of being alive? Part of being who we are and not having to worry about the world at large? I like the life we live just fine, right now. I do.

It wasn’t the same when you weren’t here.

Timeline/World: Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Indrah Laruwien
Race: Dragon
Age: 94, physically about 28
Final Word Count: 627 words

---

After the death of our daughter and our granddaughter both, things changed at home. We both knew that if it had indeed happened, perhaps it was meant to be but it still hurt. Elva had been terrified that there would be something between Arianne and Milo but I don’t know that there ever was a chance. I did understand her fear and for a while, I almost believed that the curse was still at play, I had seen it happen by ways of her memories between her and brother but I knew better, she knew better, but it still shattered something between us, something fragile and delicate.

We did talk things through and over together, like responsible adults, we decided that for a little while—it lasted a year—we would live apart. We’d gone a month together after the death, trying to act like everything was perfectly okay but it just wasn’t. She blamed herself, I blamed her, I blamed myself, and I blamed the whole world. I’d been able to tell early on that Arianne was going to be a problem, as much as Guinevere would be. I wanted to believe that she could have been ‘fixed,’ though not so much fixed as we could have worked out some way of changing her habits but the world took her away and while I hate to admit it, I’ve come to accept that just barely maybe it was for the best. Some souls are broken at birth and there is no fixing it. I had a cousin who was like that and he’d been forced to leave our dwellings.

So we talked this over with Milo who had been handling the loss well enough, we talked it over with his two older brothers and we decided on separate living for a year, see how it would go.

It went well at first. That first month was like a breath of fresh air, it was pure and soothing, and there was no strain, no stress, nothing. The second month was similar. After the third month, I started noticing things. How certain habits I had only made sense with Elva around, how I missed the scent of her hair as I fell asleep at night, the feel of her skin against mine in the mornings. The fourth month only made that more noticeable and by the sixth month I was beginning to feel like things were trying to fall apart, what had we been thinking? We did still talk, daily. Milo spent a week with her, a week with me and seemed to not be suffering for it.

When I told her that I was beginning to feel like I was growing crazy without her, she told me she felt the same. We almost decided that it was better that we cut our time apart short but we didn’t. Instead, we sort of started over. We went out on dates the way we had at the beginning, we went to the movies, picnics, shared a warm meal together, went dancing. It rekindled something that I think we both might have lost with Arianne’s death, or maybe we’d lost it trying to handle her nature, it’s hard to know. I wish I knew how Rellik and Amadeus managed together, never straying, even with the death of Guinevere but I suppose that they are different and handle things differently.

At the end of the year, Elva came back to help me pack up my things from where I’d been staying, we walked back home together and while it hasn’t been perfect every single day since, most days have been an absolute bliss and I don’t want to be apart from her ever again, not in this way. It hurts far too much.