Oh, the places we'll go

I bet my Life on this Broken Crown of Sealed Fates

     He was chosen. He was chosen, breed; raised for the role of the Shepard. And he readily took it up. The Shepard rose to the calling of both the silent and roaring pleads of the people praying for salvation and safety. He was to protect and purify-he was to become a beckon of unwavering conviction and conscious volition. Yet, as the sky remained in an everlasting twilight, it almost felt as though the sky was in a constant battle between day and night. And Sorey, the Shepard, the guiding light, the pure being of absolute good, thought of the world and questioned its ways. He wondered and wandered, but the choice was made, that bridge was already crossed and burned to ash. The aftermath was already calculated and accounted for.

     He was corrupted. He made the wrong choice and the dread settling in his gut felt like a parasite, eating away at him from the inside out. He knew. Not then, not when it really, truly mattered, but now he knew. Or maybe he did do the right thing. He did what was best for the world. Maybe he didn't though, maybe everything could have ended differently.

     The soft taps of water drops slowly eased Sorey back to reality, away from the past, from the darkly glowing glass sphere resting in his lap. The blue scaled dragon lifted his wings over Sorey, and the sound of distant thunder became a lullaby to which they both fell asleep to.

     When they awake, it's to the perpetual violet skies and a chilly breeze. Mikleo is a gorgeous dragon, with his cerulean scales and fierce violet eyes. Sometimes Sorey thinks his eyes reflect the sky. He also thinks how unfair the world is to have Mikleo share with him in his terrible fate. He then realizes how terribly late it is to figure out that you love your best friend. Maybe if Mikleo wasn't a dragon, they could have been happy.

     He tries to think of what Mikleo sounded like, tries to recall the curve of his mouth and his words, but fails to for some reason. It's at that moment, when he watches his glorious dragon circle overhead from his spot on the edge of a cliff, that he can't remember anything anymore.

     The days that follow after seem to progress much slower. 

     When Sorey wakes up one day, when his hair is in desperate need of a trim, Mikleo isn't next to him. It's when Sorey doesn't remember a time when his eyes were any other color then red, when his white flowing cape of hope changed to something akin to a trail of smoke, when he can't remember feeling anything other than pure fear of what he doesn't know. Sorey runs. Runs blindly into the night, shouting, screaming in a panic for Mikleo. Until he realizes, maybe, Mikleo wouldn't even recognize him anymore. Maybe Mikleo isn't even there, and it's just another corrupted dragon.

     There are a lot of dragons these days. More than there should even be.

     Sorey breaks down, clenching his tousled hair in tight fists, and hot tears stream down his face. He needs him. He's important, of course he's important, he's always been important. Sorey hopes, for the first time, that dawn will come. 

     It's hard to breath under the crushing weight of the world, and the feeling of such a burden brings a wave of nostalgia. His forgotten mistakes, he undoubtedly knows he's made too many to count, makes him waver in his constant fight to walk or to wait. But for what? 

     He hopes for everything to be a bad dream.

     Of course it's real, though. He watches the Iris Gems over and over and over again. Expect there's not enough room to connect the dots; there's not enough information to fully understand what transpired. He can't hear what he was saying at that crucial moment of indecisiveness; he can't hear anyone's voices from the Iris Gems anymore. The others around him all share concerned expressions, almost crestfallen at the very situation, and Sorey, the Sorey who wore the Shepard's glove proudly, looks too old for his actual age. 

     When the images stop, Sorey looks skyward. His heart is beating at his rib cage, as though building a rebellion against him. As if he were a monster, or a tainted dragon, trapping a prisoner away from freedom. Suddenly, Sorey sees flashes of war, of blood, of his own weakness against the very force he was destined to defeat. His legs feel like lead when they try to keep him upright, to keep him standing, and sometimes it feels as though he's at his wits end as to where to go from here.

     The wind softly brushes his marred face, and his cloak of black flutters behind him. In the distant, there is another roll of thunder and sparks of white light in the blackened sky. 

     And he begins to walk.  

     A new world awaits. 

     There has to be.