The last thing he gave me was his heart. It tasted like a kiss. Sounded like a promise. One hundred suns later, it became my exile.
A spear of starlight driven so precisely between the scales covering my chest, my heart shattered against the horizon, scattering into a million silver fragments across the heavens.
The Celestial Crossing loomed above us, its gates carved from living constellations, its light spilling across the sky like liquid gold. Beyond it waited eternity. Every dragon dreamed of reaching it. I was ready to reach it with him.
“I’m here,” I said, hovering before the gate. Even after one hundred suns, I could still feel the flame of his breath across my obsidian wings, the strength of his sapphire tail twined with mine.
I’ll wait for you. He had promised on the morning I left.
Now, after one hundred suns, I was too late.
One minute. That was all it had taken for a promise to become a lie. The Gatekeepers stood motionless along the threshold, their silver robes trailing like a blanket of stars. Among them stood him. The keeper I loved.
“The Crossing has closed,” he announced. The words were calm and practiced. Repeated so often they no longer belonged to the dragon speaking them.
“I’m one minute late,” I said.
“The Crossing has closed.”
My eyes narrowed, searching his onyx gaze for the soul beneath glinting sapphire scales. Instead, I found polished armor. Not my love. Only a Keeper.
“No.” The word was both whisper and plea.
I took another step.
“Too late,” the murmur rippled through the gathered dragons.
One minute. A lifetime measured by sixty heartbeats. He moved to block me. One measured step placed him between me and the Gate.
Something inside me splintered. “It took one hundred suns to get here.”
Silence.
“My wings crossed mountain ranges where the wind stripped scales from bone. I flew through storms that swallowed dragons older and stronger than me.
Still nothing.
“I only stopped to help the fallen.”
That finally stirred something behind his eyes. A flicker. Gone almost as quickly as it came.
“The others kept flying. They said stopping would cost them eternity.” I swallowed against the ache rising into my throat. “I couldn’t. Because leaving them felt worse than missing a cosmic deadline.”
Unknown faces flashed before my eyes. The bronze hatchling who refused to leave her mother’s side. The brothers I buried beneath one cairn. Every stranger became someone. Every kindness had cost me time I did not have. I would make the same choices again. Every single one. Because arriving with my soul intact mattered more than arriving first.
I looked into those onyx eyes once more.
“You know that.”
His jaw tightened. For one fragile heartbeat, I thought I saw him. Not the gatekeeper. My dragon. The one who had promised to wait.
“I know,” he said quietly.
Hope surged. His eyes found mine. For one impossible heartbeat, I saw the dragon beneath the armored scales. Beneath the words separating me from him. Then duty swallowed him whole.
“The Crossing has closed,” he said.
The words felt as foreign as him. A gate. A rule. A line carved into the stars. Was that all eternity was? A place where compassion ended exactly on time. Duty before everything. Duty before love. Duty before me.
I laughed. The sound surprised even me. Small and broken.
“If I had left them unburied where they fell, their souls would be lost to the Nether.” I looked back toward the long road disappearing beneath clouds and ash. “Is that what we have become?”
Silence answered again. More final than the closing of the Gate itself. At that moment, I understood. I had not arrived one minute too late. I had spent one hundred suns becoming the dragon the Gate could never deserve.
“Fine,” I said. The word tasted like ash. “I’ll find my own sky.”
The gates sealed with a thunderous crack. No one stopped me from leaving. Least of all him.
For three hundred and sixty-five suns, betrayal became the fire beneath my wings. Every beat of my heart carried me farther from the gate. Farther from him. Farther from everything I believed I wanted.
I flew beyond the known constellations, into the dark places the Gatekeepers deemed unworthy. There I found dying worlds on the edge of ruin and beauty no dragon had thought worth naming.
I taught comets to sing. Built observatories from crystallized starlight. Forged pathways between galaxies. The work was brutal. The work was mine.
At first, no one noticed. Then they couldn’t look away.
Pilgrims crossed entire universes to witness the Skyforge. Children traced my constellations across their night skies. Songs carried my name farther than my wings ever could. The dragons who had exiled me now spoke of me with reverence.
One cycle later, they arrived. Not as Gatekeepers. Not as judges. As guests. As petitioners.
The Festival of First Fire illuminated the Skyforge in rivers of flame when they entered my open gates. I recognized them immediately. Their silver robes gleamed. The same stars woven into their collars. The same duty etched into their scales.
Only now they looked upward instead of downward. Wonder had replaced regulation.
“We always knew you were destined for greatness,” one elder said.
Of course they had. They had always known. They simply never believed I would achieve it without them. That was why they closed the Gate.
“We would like acknowledgement,” another continued. “History should remember the role the Celestial Crossing played in your ascension.”
I stared at them. Then my gaze drifted past the robes and titles.
To him. The keeper who held my promise. My hope. The keeper who had kissed me goodbye.
Time had silvered the stars along his magnificent tail. Silvered the horns crowning his face. But I still knew those eyes.
“Surely,” he said, stepping forward, “history should remember our contribution.”
I studied him for a long time. Long enough to see the dragon who once stood beneath the Celestial Crossing. The one whose warm breath once slipped between the diamond-shaped plates of my scales. I looked again.
Memory is cruel. Familiar scales can hide a stranger.
I suddenly understood. The greatest strangers are the ones who once knew your story and chose not to keep it.
The shattered pieces of my heart stirred. No longer broken. Reforged.
“Of course.”
Relief washed across their faces as I offered the kindness of a gentle smile. I opened the Book of Stars resting upon the Skyforge pedestal and dipped my claw into silver fire. I wrote the names of every dragon I had buried.
The hatchling. The brothers. The forgotten. Every stranger who had become someone.
Only after the last name did I write my own. I closed the Book and met his onyx gaze one final time. He searched my face for the dragon who once hoped for the stars. I searched for the dragon who had promised to wait.
Neither of us found what we were looking for. I smiled politely. A smile I would give to a stranger whose name I no longer needed to remember.
The last thing I gave him was goodbye. It tasted like nothing. Sounded like silence.
I spread my wings. One beat. Then another. One minute later…
I was gone.