Chapter 1: Prologue

Saoirse stood on the rim of the volcano, the stench of rotten eggs assaulting her nose, every breath bringing smoke and grit into her lungs, threatening to choke her.

Yet even the billowing black smoke couldn’t hide the soft bachelor-button blue of the sky and the deeper teal of the ocean, stretching out in all directions. One last time Saoirse pressed into the sea, letting the color sound come. The life beneath the waves sang to her a symphony of chimes and jingles, rat-tat-tats, booms, bangs, bellows and blasts. Loud horns echoed, symbols crashed, thunderbolts clapped. Violas drifted in, with complex harmonies, thirds and fifths and strange sevenths, all darting and twisting. A bass drum crescendoed and died and swelled again. Pings, pongs, whistles and flutes, maracas clicking and harps plucking, brought a poignant smile to her lips. How she longed to listen forever.

She turned to gaze at Aonair’s beautiful sapphire blue aura spread out around him a full twenty feet in all directions. She drank in the peace it brought her. Hauntingly his color sound played its sad melody. She would never again hear its one-time joyful refrain.

Inside his aura, as if magic itself were saying goodbye to her, a thousand snow-white threads formed an ever-changing kaleidoscope of stars, snowflakes, and swirls.

If I don’t this now, I’ll never do it.

Clenching her fist, she forced herself to face the dragon.

The beast lay on a bed of cooling lava, the black cracked surfaced revealing, in thin meandering channels and small pools, the fiery red molten rock beneath. The heinous creature was stretched out on its belly its four legs extended outward to each side. The dragon’s long snout also lay flat against the harsh, jagged, rock, its mouth open, its black tongue extended and uncurled. If not for the horned spikes running down its back, its huge wings, its lethal razor sharp tail and reeking breath, it might have been a pup flopped on a rug in front of a fire.

Saoirse knew what to do, to save Aonair, to save them all. As a species dragons had only one redeeming quality, they never broke their word. And the dragon had given her its word, it had sworn an oath. Everyone she loved would be safe if she simply stepped onto its tongue, slid down its throat, and died. She was dragon food, and the beast was starving to death. Aonair, Alyse, they’d all tried to save her, but no one can kill a dragon. For thousands of years the seers of old had died like she was going to die. They’d been powerful, too. Why had she ever been foolish enough to hope, to think she could get away, to believe even for a moment, that love would be enough, that love could save her? Unbidden, the mage’s words came back to her, "We cannot see love's destination, before we travel love's path.”

But I can see my destination. I’m going to die.

She stepped forward onto the crusty, cracking surface. Behind her Aonair struggled against her magic holding him fast. Agony ripped a single word from his throat “No!”

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If only we’d never gone back. We could’ve been free.

She couldn’t breathe.

Just three more steps.

Her whole body shook.

Two more steps.

She looked down, seeing on the rough burnt leather of her boots, the faint yellow green aura of some tiny bit of mold desperately trying to make its home there.

As tears wet her cheeks, she spoke to it, “I want to live, too.”

One more step. I can do this.

She closed her eyes, and casting her voice upon the wind, whispered, “I love you, Aonair,” and stepped on the dragon’s tongue.

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