Minutes bled into hours as Draegon carved through the sky, the weight of the unconscious angel in his arms acting as a constant, grinding reminder of his treachery. Her rhythmic breathing against his chest was the only sign of life in a world that had suddenly turned hostile.
When he finally descended into the isolated forest, the air grew thick and stagnant. He dropped her to the loam, the impact jarring her awake.
"Cover yourself. Hide those wings," Draegon commanded, tossing a blood-stained cloth stripped from a corpse. His voice was a flat, serrated edge—devoid of warmth, purely pragmatic. "We don't need a beacon for every scavenger in the wastes."
Alitia stared at him, her eyes clouded with the hesitation of the damned. She complied, her wings retracting into her back with a sickening, ethereal shimmer of fading light.
Three years of exile had changed them.
Alitia stood near the edge of the boulder, the memory of that day—the cold, calculated betrayal of an empire—tasting like ash in her mouth. She was an anomaly, a creature loathed by her own kind, tethered to a man who had burned his legacy to the ground to keep her alive.
Behind her, Draegon's silhouette was rigid. He had been silent for hours, his gaze fixed on the horizon where their pursuers were inevitably closing the net. When he looked at their son, the boy shivering in the mountain chill, his eyes didn't hold the warmth of a father—they held the frantic, desperate calculation of a predator cornered in his own den.
"We move," he rasped. Before she could breathe, he hoisted her into his arms, his movements blurring as he surged into the air.
The speed was unnatural, a violent tear through the atmosphere that forced Alitia to bury her face into his shoulder to keep from blacking out.
Draegon tore through the sky for several hours, coming at a hault near a waterfall
"We are here" his eyes lingered on Alitia for a while. He head straight for the waterfall, slowly this time. The waters splashed on them, but somehow they weren't wet
The cave behind the waterfall was a tomb, silent and smelling of damp moss. But the silence didn't last.
It shattered under the weight of an aura so heavy it felt like the earth itself was collapsing. Draegon hit the ground, his knees buckling as the pressure forced the air from his lungs. It was an absolute, suffocating presence—the Divine Dragon God.
"Of all the stains upon the Empire, I didn't expect to find you," the god murmured. His voice wasn't loud; it was an anchor of pure gravity.
Draegon didn't wait. He didn't offer a plea. He lunged, a desperate, kinetic burst of speed meant to intercept the god before he could reach Alitia. His boot connected with the deity's side—a strike that should have leveled a mountain—but the god barely shifted.
"Was it worth it?" the god whispered, his hand clamping onto Draegon's shoulder, a grip that promised the structural failure of bone.
"Run!" Draegon roared, his voice cracking.
Alitia scrambled toward the portal, her essence hemorrhaging into the stones, turning them from dull gray to a blinding, desperate gold. She scooped up their child, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
A sudden, sharp displaced pressure behind her signaled the end. She turned, expecting to see Draegon, but saw only the impossible movement of the god. The air ripped. The golden glow of the portal shattered into dust, the light dying before her eyes.
Draegon hit the cavern wall, his right arm dangling at a sickening, broken angle. Through the haze of his own blood, he saw the figure blur past him. He tried to rise, to push his broken body into one last movement, but a blow to his ribs sent him skidding into the dark.
He looked up just as the last of the light vanished. The portal was gone. And then, the shadows began to burn—consuming the cave in a tide of cold, black flame.