The Course of History

Her lungs were filled with the damp air of the forest when she saw it. It was just a glimmer of red before it became anything truly substantial. And even then it would be days before she actually believed her eyes, before they settled on gray and her mind was finally convinced the flickers weren’t actually wild fantasies.

Days after she had instinctively memorized the lines on his face and the fading purple under his eyes, she would be the first to speak. It would be nothing but a hesitant hello and it wouldn’t be met with a response until the next day, when the twigs snapped in an obvious way under his feet, and she could just barely hear the slipping of leaves and branches that marked another presence.

“People don’t normally venture out this way,” he stated from what she mentally counted as six feet. She heard clearly the question in the words, and she would have replied if the answer had been present at the time. Instead, her lips pressed together and she waited for his next move, whether it be a word or a step. Her own brown eyes flicked from his feet, balancing on the lush green of the grass as if he owned the kingdoms of nature, the two gray orbs set in his skull like clouds mixed together without thought of rain or shine, and the parted lips that seemed to be waiting for permission to knit more syllables into the air between them.

“What’s your excuse?” he asked. She wasn’t sure if his tone was curious or if the question was only meant to fill the pauses that were guaranteed by her guarded position on the rotting tree trunk beneath her.

“Do I need one?”

She wasn’t one of the people that denied first loves, even if that first love was the most trivial decision she had ever made. But she would always deny that her first question to this man had been an almost squeaking call into the trees and the bushes for confirmation of presence. Because the second one, the one she had just managed to ask without backing down, was the start of something more important than any greeting could be.

“No,” he said, “you don’t.”



The first time she told him what she was there for, what she was sitting in the grass and the dirt for, he reacted with a fallen expression that she couldn’t even begin to make sense of.

He was, once again, positioned six feet away from her; it might have been five this time, because she could distinctly pick out more of the storminess in his eyes. This time they were both sitting and she had slipped to the grass instead of her customary seat. The wood was slowly beginning to rot into nothing but holes and she preferred to be on the same level as him.

The twisting of his lips was a tell that everyone she had met possessed. It sent a pang of something unneeded through her stomach that laced itself upwards until her heart was clenching in steady waves of the worst sort of homesick.

She could already tell what his question was supposed to be. She neither pushed it away nor pulled it towards her.

It struck her as some kind of odd trust she didn’t deserve when he changed his words and focused on himself instead of on her.

“My name is Murtagh,” he told her in a tone she wouldn’t forget. “In case it helps at all.”



Murtagh didn’t step across the boundary of five feet. She honestly didn’t know if he had drawn it or she had. All she knew was the tangible taste of solid walls and steeled minds.

Even with a set boundary, it wasn’t difficult to tell that something had shifted.

It could have been the fact that he was still there, that he kept coming back. Or it could be the words he spoke that nudged pieces into place in her brain. No, not exactly intp place. But they skimmed the edges of their holes, tipped just slightly towards their proper places.



“Finding yourself is one of the most dangerous things in the world,” Murtagh told her when he stood a very positive five feet away.

She could hear him before she saw him, could hear the scratching that replaced the sliding before she saw the red in the dim sunlight. Her eyes, normally trained on Murtagh from the moment his figure broke through the brush, centered on the towering beast made of red and fire and the purest beauty she’d ever seen.

She would have gasped if there had been any air in her lungs.

The boundary was invisible to him.

“His name is Thorn,” Murtagh introduced. His eyes were fixed carefully on her, though she only kept her own on Thorn. Her mouth was slowly forming an almost undignified O.

Almost, he could think with clarity.

Her hand reached tentatively towards the dragon’s glittering scales, fingers brushing eagerly at the air between them but never venturing farther than what she deemed safe. “What’s it like?” she asked as last. “To have a dragon? To be a Rider?”

He eyed her with spiked curiosity. The word Rider fell from her lips with so much marvel, so much reverence that he couldn’t help but feel the need to straighten his shoulders in her presence. As if he were a god standing before his most devoted disciple.

Murtagh’s mind dipped in on itself in an attempt to find the proper explanation for what the girl wanted to know. He wanted to meld all three of their minds together, to perhaps inspire in her the feeling of flight, the sweet cold of clouds spraying across your face in mists, or the powerful thundering he felt within the very fibers of his being each time Thorn lifted his voice to the heavens. It would all be too much, though, and he did not wish to force his consciousness on the girl and scare her away.

Instead, he reached with his mind to nudge the familiar ringing presence of Thorn. Thorn’s mind lifted in an acknowledgement of the request and his great head dipped heavily before the girl’s hesitant hand. She seemed to freeze for a moment, a long stretch of uneasiness causing the part of her mind Murtagh could sense to ripple uncertainly. For a moment he expected her to bolt through the brush behind her as a rabbit would flee a fox. He felt an unmistakable curl on his lips at the image of himself as that fox.

After the initial torrent of skittering emotions calmed, her fingers curled so that their tips brushed lightly across Thorn’s muzzle. He snorted hot air through his nostrils in a sign of playfulness that Murtagh recognized from the many times he himself was still frightened of touching the dragon’s brilliant scales.

Unaware of this side of the dragon and only privy to the mass of muscle and twisting magic in front of her, she jolted as the hot air shot across her hand and brushed past her cheeks.
Murtagh let out a quiet laugh. “Perhaps you will find out one day,” he answered her earlier question with a softer voice.

She eyed the now withdrawn dragon with some doubt. “Perhaps,” she relented.



She didn’t know how long it would take, had never really known at all. Sure, when she had set out she had grand ideas of a week in the woods, a week under a clear, clear sky, a week of light pondering until the revelation washed over her in a relaxing release.

That was gone now.

She was a little shy of a month spent out here now. A little shy of a month spent staring at filtered sunlight and gray eyes. And, still, nothing was sure. It was the most discouraging thing.

Finding yourself is one of the most dangerous things in the world.

She tried to make lists. Lists of what she was, lists of what she loved, lists that, stitched together, were her. The problem was, detached from the world, separate from the world she’d grown up in, she didn’t know, she didn’t remember.

Hard, yes. Most certainly. Dangerous? Not unless she started pulling her hair out in frustration.



She couldn’t feel the shadows under her eyes, but she was certain they were there. It was reflected easily in the expressions Murtagh would toss her.

The lists weren’t working. Progress wasn’t being made and she was waiting for the final internal decision that would send her back home, forgetting about the task she had set out to complete.

Even as that decision sank in, she found it impossible to be alone. Murtagh’s presence seemed to press in on her, seemed to be there well through the night and early in the dawn. It was a tiring feeling, always being watched.

She could have lashed out (though she thought it could never be met by positive results), but instead she relented and let him see her shoulders drop.

Okay, she agreed silently as his gaze softened. It’s dangerous.



She went back to lists. They were considerably more jumbled this time, but it felt like a comfort she could afford once she was finally left without an accusing stare.

She went back to listing the things she did, the things that stuck with her.

She had learned to read, she knew how to write, she could bribe any merchant that crossed her path.

She bled into personality when that list bored her. Personality was trickier, was more dangerous. There were things to dodge and things to dig up.

Easily angered and stubborn. Creative and cautious.

The things she loved would be the list that struck her the most. What did she love?

She loved open fields and enclosed forests. She loved her mother, her siblings, her friends. She loved simplicity and complexity. She loved the sky at night and tiny flames in the dark.

She was in love with red and gray and fire and smoke. She was in love with storms reflecting fire, with pressed in presences that told her she wasn’t alone. With the taste of words unspoken and invisible walls, meant to be broken.

Her eyes slid closed and she let a breath leave her in a sweep of melting negativity, then breathed in the cold air of finality.



At first, he didn’t say anything when next he came, but the boundaries were gone and his warmth was beside her, one hand twitching on his leg, the other lying loosely open for her.

“It was late at night when it happened to me,” he said in a voice meant only for this clearing. “I slept for three days straight afterwards.”

“I’m not that tired,” she said with a smile and a tightened grip.

He looked at her and she decided that she was most in love with the light swatches of sunny gray between the stormy clouds.

“My name is Aleka,” she said in a breath of discovery. “In case it helps at all.”