Night Fury's Wrath

Chapter 49: Tattered Bonds

Mom made it look so easy. She laid eggs and recovered quickly and smoothly. She told me she always felt sore 'down there' when I asked, sometimes with a little bleeding, but it usually wasn't too bad. Afterward, she claimed that sitting with the egg to keep it warm was somehow entertaining.

I didn't know how she did it. Egg-laying had been one of the most painful experiences in my life, and I didn't even finish laying it before I had serious complications. What's more, my recovery was difficult. Sudden movements hurt, walking hurt, and even breathing too deeply hurt. As if that wasn't enough, Myrkr prohibited me from doing much of anything, which led to mind-numbing boredom. There was only so much thinking about the egg I could handle before I wanted to gnaw my tail off for something to do. 

Even Vænn couldn't stave off my boredom, though I wondered why he was still here; I was sure Mom or Dad should've picked him up a few nights ago. At the moment, he was happily burrowing in my oversized nest. Clumps of moss were displaced on the surface as he squirmed through underneath. Oh, to be an innocent, playful hatchling again...

"I'm bored." Simple and to the point; that's just how I felt right now.

Myrkr didn't take his attention off of my neck. For whatever reason, he was inspecting it very closely. "I know."

"Entertain me!"

"Sure. What do you want to do, aside from running around like a hyper hatchling?" He warbled, not unlike the fifty other times. He never got irritated about it, even when I tried to annoy him on purpose. Instead, he shrugged it off, reasoning that it could help my true self come out more. 

I huffed petulantly, knowing what his answer would be if I voiced any of my ideas. I wanted to burn some energy, but most of those activities could reopen my wounds, so Myrkr vetoed all of them. "What are you doing, anyway?" I asked, choosing a less repetitive response.

"Thinking," he murmured, brushing his nose over my neck scales. His voice betrayed that something was up. "Do you have any new ideas for bringing out your inner personality?"

I didn't, but I doubted that was what he had on his mind at the moment. Quick deduction led to another possibility entirely, one that fit in with Myrkr's habits. "They're only scars, Myrkr."

"What?"

He sounded indifferent, but I could tell by his tense posture that he was anything but. "You're only touching or smelling parts of me with missing scales and heavy scarring," I stated in a monotone, eyeing him from where my head lay in the moss. "The only places I was bound in chains." I hadn't known Myrkr for even two season-cycles yet, but I felt like I understood him better than even myself. This, to me, was obvious.

Myrkr didn't speak for several moments while he gently grazed my neck with his nose. "I had a nightmare," he finally confessed, his voice faint despite being next to my ears. "I saw you in chains again, but you were pregnant. I saw your abusers beating you. The chains were choking you, but you somehow kept screaming my name, begging me to save you. I couldn't; I was only allowed to watch." He pushed his nose into the crook of my neck. "I watched you die. Then... Th-Then... they stomped on your stomach, and crushed our egg."

Silence reigned in the wake of that horrifying tale, only broken by Vænn's occasional chirp while he dug through the moss. I didn't like to remember my time in that prison; I avoided thinking about it as much as possible, though there were some blanks in my memories there. But Myrkr had a nightmare about it, meaning he probably thought about it sometimes. And now that I thought about it, how could he not? He saw me every night, he saw my scars and still missing scales, which served as constant reminders of my abduction and torture. He had seen his mate chained down, beaten, gravely ill, and who knew what else. That was perfect nightmare-fuel.