Dragon’s Child

The night sky was clear and scattered full of stars—and I blazed like a comet of light across it.

Not quite as quickly as one, though. After all, I couldn’t leave my sister entirely behind.

Showoff! Rona called out from at least an eld behind me. Even her inner voice was strained from her mighty effort to keep up. Her enormous, golden drakáwings pounded the air with the buffeting force of a hurricane. She was a fast flyer, for a drakón and a Sunfilled. In fact, one of the fastest, so she wasn’t accustomed to losing a race. Then again, she normally avoided racing a luson like me.

Especially me. Not even Mother could match me for speed.

I glanced back at her, my lips pulled into a wide grin—an unusually carefree expression for me. You’re the one who insisted you needed a race tonight.

And at night, too, when only a luson in lightform, as I was now, could provide a drakón like her the power she needed to sustain drakáform. That was why I couldn’t leave her completely in the dust—not if I didn’t want my twin sister to lose power and drakáform entirely and plummet like a stone from the sky. Which I didn’t…most of the time.

Definitely not right now.

I thought you would go at least a little easier on me, she grumbled.

The unsaid half of her statement was clear enough: Seeing as how I’m doing this for you.

I knew that. She had done all of this—proposing the race, sneaking us out, enduring the humiliation of inevitably losing—for me. To cheer me up and wear me out on a night I otherwise might have spent sleeplessly pacing, given what awaited us in the morning.

I had to grudgingly admit to myself that it was working. Feeling the wind tug at my long white hair—even bound as usual in a tail at the nape of my neck—feeling the cool, energizing air rush past me, and being in the safe, dark palm of the star-studded sky were melting all my tension from before away. With midnight so close in this snow-covered northern mountain range of Lumina, the Seventh Realm, every inch of my brilliant humanoid lightform radiated power so mightily that it wisped off me in streams of white, glowing vapor, flowing like a comet’s tail behind me as I shot across the night like an untamed thing, wild and free.

So unlike my usual self.

Life once again felt not just bearable, but hopeful. Happy.

Maybe we could do this, Rona and I. Just maybe.…

I didn’t let myself think further than that, lest I spoil all the good things that Rona had sacrificed to give me.

Instead, I answered her, If I did that, I wouldn’t be giving you a real race, now, would I?

Contrary to what my careless reply implied, I was glancing back at her frequently to gauge the distance between us. I saw as soon as her wingbeats became more labored, the steam billowing from her open jaws reached its peak, and she began to lag behind.