The wind was dry and hot, like the breath of an ancient beast long dead. Beneath me, the Red Waste stretched to the ends of the world, endless and cruel. The color of it was unnatural rust-red, burnt sienna, and blood. The earth cracked and split like old skin, and no trees reached for the sky here. Nothing green grew. No rivers flowed. It was a dead sea of dust and forgotten bones.
I had left the haunted ruins of Valyria behind days ago or perhaps weeks. Time no longer weighed heavily on me. I had flown far, and far again. My wings had carved across the air like blades of shadow and flame. I passed over broken spires, ruined temples, and lands where the very ground whispered in fear. Now, there was only sky behind and sky ahead. And heat.
The sun loomed heavy and golden overhead, but I did not fear it. I was born of fire. I was forged in ash and blood. I was Vezdaryon — "Son of Flame and Destruction"
I had grown. The scars on my side, from battles past, shimmered like silver against my dark scales. My wingspan spread like the shadow of a storm, casting shade that danced across the dunes. My talons carved gouges into ancient stone as I flew low, the air shivering from the heat trailing off my body.
Once, long ago, I had been something else. I remembered vague echoes two legs, small hands, hunger that came without flame but those thoughts were dust now, dry and crumbling like the wasteland below. I had lived fifteen years in this world. Fifteen years of sky, heat, wind, and fire. I had killed to live, bled to grow, endured to become more. Now, there was nothing left of the boy. Only the dragon remained.
I passed over the crumbled skeleton of a long-dead city. Sand had swallowed its walls, but I saw the outline of towers, half buried. Time and the sun had taken everything. I circled once, then descended, talons cracking old stone beneath me as I landed.
The silence was endless here thick, oppressive, almost sacred. The Red Waste did not hum with insects. It did not carry birdsong. It was not the kind of silence that waited to be broken; it was the kind that endured. I folded my wings and prowled through the ruins, my eyes scanning the land with instinct sharpened through years of survival.
I found bones. Human bones their spines curled in death, arms still stretched out to shields of dried leather. There were old wagons, half buried and blackened. Rusted blades. A spear snapped in half. Their faces were gone, eaten by time. What remained were reminders: this was not a land that gave second chances.
I drank from a cracked basin filled with brackish water collected from the last rains, long ago. It tasted of dust and copper, but it was enough. My kind did not need much. I had learned restraint. Where I once flew with reckless hunger, now I flew with purpose. My wings bore the strength of years, and every movement was calculated.
When the heat burned high, I rested atop a stone plateau. I curled my body into the shadow of a collapsed archway, its top scorched and bent. The wind howled, but I did not fear it. I listened to it. The desert had a language of its own it whispered warnings in the grains of sand that brushed across my scales.
I watched as the sun dipped into the horizon, and the world turned gold, then crimson, then black. The stars came out like a ceiling full of frozen fire. I did not dream. I did not miss dreaming. I had grown into something dreams feared.
In the distance, I saw lights not torches, not cities. Flickers of flame, moving in patterns. Wyverns, perhaps. Or men on the edge of death. I did not follow them. There was no curiosity left in me for the affairs of small creatures. Not unless they crossed my path.
I slept again the next day, wings tucked tight, tail curled around me like a serpent guarding a mountain. My breath steamed in the coolness of nightfall, and fire pulsed softly in my chest, flickering under my ribs like a hearth that never went out. There was something peaceful in it not comfort, but order.
When dawn came again, I flew.
I climbed high into the sky and pushed through a wall of wind. The dunes below grew distant, like waves of an ocean I no longer touched. And still I flew. The sky was open and empty, the air pure and hard, like glass against my snout.
I reached the cliffs on the edge of the Waste great jagged black stone like teeth. Mountains long dead. There were caves here, and I marked them with my scent, knowing I might return. A dragon always needs a place to sleep between storms.
Below, great chasms opened like mouths in the earth. I dove into one, riding the currents, my wings brushing the walls as I twisted and turned. Lava still bubbled far below not rivers, but scars in the ground that glowed faintly with red light. The warmth of it soothed my muscles, and I roared, not in warning, not in anger but for the joy of hearing my voice echo through an empty world.
I kept flying, far and farther. Past dying lakes, salt flats, crumbled statues of gods long forgotten. My shadow passed over all of them. Nothing rose to challenge me. No creature made its home in this land that did not understand fear.
Eventually, I found a narrow ridge, split in half by a crack that went down and down into fire. I landed beside it, tail flicking the dust. I stared into the chasm for a long time.
Below me was the world's wound.
It hissed. It pulsed. It glowed.
I looked into the molten light and did not flinch. It was not my enemy. It was my kin. We were born of the same thing old, angry fire, and time too long to measure.
And as I sat there, I thought of nothing. Not words. Not people. Not the boy I had once been. Just the wind. The sun. The heat. And the feeling of strength curling through my body like coiled lightning.
I would not stay here forever. The world was vast. But I would remember this place. The Waste had taught me something I had forgotten in all the years of flight: even in death, there is still fire.
And fire remembers.
——
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