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kajones_writingMeriwether shrugged. “We all heard stories about how the Dragon King dealt with his people after that and that made the fae, in general, fear him more, because he hadn’t shown any mercy. In his position I wouldn’t have done either – if he hadn’t of been as harsh as he was the same thing would have happened again, which might well have led to someone else becoming the ruling monarch, and that was something we really didn’t want to happen, as a lot of the other Dragons viewed the fae as nothing more than a nuisance. Considering what they went through after the Yellows realised the mistake they made…
“As far as we know it was the first time the Yellows had used created souls instead of simply using the souls of fae who had volunteered to be a part of the experimentation that the family did. There is, of course, a chance they’d done the same thing before, but the records were destroyed, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. It isn’t as though we hadn’t hidden our own history from ourselves before, because we were embarrassed or wished we hadn’t made those mistakes.” He sighed. “Unfortunately the one thing we were very good at was hiding things from ourselves.
“If the Dragons hadn’t managed to convince the Yellows who had created them to continue with what they were doing, and I use the word convince loosely as Jaromir threatened them into making the rest of his race, then we would have hidden the knowledge of what had happened then too. Although I remember Jaromir saying later that it hadn’t been him who’d told the fae to finish the job they were doing or die, but one of his advisers, who later turned against him, because she didn’t think that he was capable of making it happen.”
“Should he have been King if they didn’t believe in him?”
“From what I read the only reason he was the King was because he was the first of them to be created. If it wasn’t for that then one of the other Dragons would have been their monarch and that wouldn’t have been good for the Thirteen Families, because the first thing the King’s two main advisers wanted to do was remove the Queen at the time, so they could take over the land belonging to the Families and Jaromir could become their monarch at the same time, which would have meant that the Dragon grew, as a race, much faster than they did. Jaromir didn’t agree, but he did ask the fae who followed him to talk to their friends and family to see if there was anyone else who might join them.
“In the end I think nearly a hundred fae who had once been a part of the Thirteen Families chose to join the Dragons and just six Dragons – three male and three female. Jaromir was more sensible than I thought he would be about it, because it would have been easy enough for him to simply say that the males should breed with all the female fae, to make as many babies as possible, even though doing something like that could easily have gone wrong. Even though his advisers were trying to convince him to do what they thought was the right thing he started his breeding program slowly. He chose one of the fae who had originally joined them as his first lover and asked for her to help him to write the family trees for all of the fae who had accepted his rule.
“She helped him, because she was falling in love with him, but she accepted that he was going to need to breed with others. They did marry though and she had six of his children, all of whom were royalty, while the children he had outside his marriage were given less titles, as he loved her too. When she died he chose not to marry again, he never loved anyone else – apart from his children, and it wasn’t long after that the civil war started. It was as though his advisers expected him to become less himself when he finally ‘rid himself’ of the fae witch who had enchanted him, but he didn’t. Jaromir wasn’t who he was because of her – it just was who he was and in the end there were Dragons who couldn’t accept that. Especially when he made the decision to not have any more children.
“At that point he’d had more than enough and their race was growing with every generation that was born, which he realised could be a problem, as they were immortal. That meant they had to be more careful than the fae, who had long life spans but did eventually die, as they might end up needing more land than they had been given by the Queen of the Thirteen families, who had died nearly two hundred years before the civil war, when she was assassinated. Jaromir found out after the war that she was assassinated by one of his Dragons and that changed him. He decided then that he was best off being in total control of the Dragons, rather than having a Council, although it turned out that Draven pretty much took over when that happened.
“Draven was Jaromir’s eldest son and was always going to be King, even though he never knew when. Before the civil war it seemed unlikely that it would be in the next century. Then, when Jaromir began to hate his own race, things changed, and Draven became King in all but name before he was ready. At the time Willow was planning to leave Kalinia he’d been in the position for nearly three hundred years and it was him who convinced Jaromir that a new start would be good for them… and it would be good for him too, give him a chance to let go of the past, of the people he’d had no choice but to execute, and begin again.”
“What happened?”
“I wish I knew. The world they stepped onto isn’t one that’s known by Athare, so the Dragon’s story ended with them leaving Kalinia behind, taking with them some of the shifters. A few of the groups went with Willow to Earth – the cats, the dogs, the rabbits, the seals, basically those who wouldn’t be viewed as dangerous. It was the predators who followed the Dragons – the wolves, the big cats, the ones who knew they would never be accepted by the humans but wanted to survive. Even though Willow was willing to take her with them she was glad they’d made the choice to go to where they could be themselves, rather than being on a world where they would feel like they’d need to hide their true nature. Willow made it so that we didn’t even know where the Dragons had gone, because they said they were going with Willow’s fae to Earth, but then ended up somewhere entirely different. She’d always cared about Draven, even though he was a Dragon.”
“Even though he was a Dragon?”
“Her fae were terrified of the Dragons, more so than the Thirteen Families, because the territory that the Queen gave them bordered onto the territory of Willow’s fae and before the civil war broke out there were some mysterious deaths that they had a feeling was down to the rebels Dragons. It was never proven, but it seems likely, because the rebels Dragons had decided that they didn’t just want the land belonging to the Thirteen Families. No, they wanted all the land the fae owned and they wanted rid of the fae entirely. There’s every chance that they already knew, even as early as that, what we were doing to Kalinia, so their aim was to protect the world that had become theirs because of the choices the fae made.
“I don’t know why Jaromir didn’t feel the same way. Maybe he felt closer to the fae because of his relationship, and nearly all the Dragons had fae blood running in their veins, but he made the decision to protect us from his race. He could easily have worked with his people to destroy us. Really, that would have made more sense than letting us love, when we were weakening Kalinia every time we used magic for something that could have been done without, every time we created something or made a new door, every time we put ourselves first. We killed races who’d lived on Kalinia longer than we had, we forced others to leave their homes behind, and all of the choices we made were the wrong ones.” Meriwether rubbed his antler. “Would we have made different decisions if we knew we’d already destroyed a world? I doubt it. We wouldn’t have been able to believed that we’d do the same thing again, even though we’d already done it once before, and I think if it hadn’t been for the fear we were all feeling when we first came here we would have been able to bury everything once again.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.
