#dadan has all the stuff that was hidden behind the stone btw

[mjrtaurus]

Dark!Dragon finding his way back to Dawn, looking for something- anything- to reconnect him with who he had been.

He couldn’t read the news boards and fliers that were pinned and plastered around the village with the windmills, but he recognizes the face of the master in the photos and assumes the world at large knows of its death. He also recognizes his mother and father in those things he’s heard called “Bounty Posters”. He took them. They are old, and that bodes ill. He can’t make heads or tails of the letters and numbers anymore, but something in him knows that all those oblong circles at the bottom mean his parents have become very dangerous people.

Memory retraces his steps from the square, to the market, to the alleys and the backstreets. Sometimes he can almost see the bounce of copper red curls as his elder sister guides him…

And then he comes to the path that splits off the main road connecting Foosha to Goa, and he’s taken out of his reverie. It’s grown over. Just barely there anymore. He follows it. All the way to the ruin that had been his childhood home.

It’s a burnt out husk. A few timbers that had blackened to charcoal poking out of the foundation like rotted teeth. The garden is overgrown with all the plants his mother used to carefully tend, the vines and branches choking the life out of each other without the love and care she gave them.

He finds himself picking through the wreckage and finding nothing of the family that used to live here. All the pictures frames were broken and the photos unrecognizable, the furniture reduced to a few nails and screws in heaps of ash, toys nothing but a few stray bits of yarn and yellowed batting.

The root cellar has been ransacked. Preserved foods and local wines all missing from the shelves or broken on the floor. The loose stone that Mamay showed them, behind it where she and Tayta hid their most precious, sentimental things… The stone was moved, and everything behind it was gone.

There was nothing left.

He felt… empty.

Here he was, so close to everything, but farther than he’d ever been. The answer to the question that’s kept him alive and fighting for so long is right here, all around, but to broken to make sense of.

Had he been loved?

Had that been too much to ask for?

He sinks to the flagstones, wraps himself up in the ratty cloak around his shoulders.

He’ll sleep here tonight, and then… he doesn’t know. Pick a direction and fly as far from this damned place as he can.

…

“Who the hell are you?!”

The shout drags him from uneasy dreams. He rises to his feet, ready to fight or die, and sees copper red curls.

“Dadan…?”

“… Dragon?!”