Daranor the Unmoored

They name me Unmoored as if a harbor ever held a sky. Once, perhaps, a line of gold joined heart to heart—mine to a mortal’s—so that two pulses learned the same weather. In those years I answered to Daranor of the Ridge, elder of the high thermals, oath-keeper of the pact between dragon and rider. The name has not changed. Only the answers have.

Ascendance.
Itharûn built terraces where the wind is born and called them eyries. There, amid banners that snapped like small thunder, I bent my neck to a young High Flamekeeper named Aeraleth. He came with hands unafraid of heat and a voice that did not order, only asked. We climbed the sky together—first as trial, then as vow. In the old rite, rider and dragon share embers: his palm to my breast, my breath upon his sternum. If either flinches, the spark dies. We did not flinch.

With Aeraleth, patrol became pilgrimage. We watched storm-fronts shoulder the ridges and learned to read their moods; we escorted caravans along knife-edge passes; we answered disputes by landing in the middle of them and letting our shadow cool angry faces. I spoke little, but he understood my silences—the long gleam toward distant peaks, the tilt of a horn when another flight called. “The pact is not a leash,” he would tell trainees in the ring below. “It is a bell-rope. Pull it gently and something sacred answers.” He was not wrong.

Fracture.
Then the bell-rope was cut.

When the Shattering came, the air itself grew cross-grained. Lightning wandered without aim, veering off into faults you could not see until they ripped you sideways. The bond—how to tell you?—the bond that had once felt like a steady, sun-warmed braid turned brittle, full of grit. I caught Aeraleth twice that winter with my foreclaws when stair and stone bucked under him. I caught him a third time in midair when the ley-currents hiccupped and our carefully counted beats spooled into nonsense. He smiled with brave teeth, pressed his brow to the ridge between my eyes, and said, “We will learn the new wind.”

But some winds teach subtraction. A sky cracked by wild magic asks a question the pact was never forged to answer: Are you together because you choose, or because the spell says so? I felt voices that were not his tug at my temper, old instincts waking like wolves in snow. Fight, fly, hoard, burn. I did not want them—and yet they were mine. The day I dropped him, it was not from malice. The leyline kinked; the air bit; I clenched my wings to find clean flow and he slipped. He lived, but the silence that followed had weight.

I fled the ridges that night with stormfire in my chest, not away from Aeraleth but away from what I might do if the madness came again. In the borderlands I learned the new map of updraft and ruin. I hunted alone, slept little, and tore spells from the air when they tried to nest in my lungs. They began to call me Unmoored, as if I had cut the rope; it was the world that severed it. Even so, the name fit my ache.

Twilight.
Time made the ragged places scab over. No peace, but fewer surprises. Itharûn rebuilt under a new bearer of the flame, and the flights that remained gathered around their weary banners. Riders I did not know lifted their hands to me from terrace walls—half blessing, half plea. I circled, considered, and kept my distance.

Flamebearer, they called the new leader. I knew the shape of that title in old song. He sent envoys to the ledges where I liked to watch the storms bruise the horizon: respectful, careful with words. One was Ysara Flamewing, whose dragon burned with a young courage that stung the eyes. Another was Ser Kaelen, a soldier whose voice had learned to be softer with age. They did not ask me to return. They asked what I remembered.

I told them truths. That the pact was better when it breathed. That riders and dragons were not halves seeking completion but whole beings choosing alignment. That Aeraleth and I had made something fine, and fine things can still fail when the foundation slips. I told them I would never again wear tack that bit scale, nor sleep in eyries lit for men more than for dragons. If partnership was to come, it would come with the door unbarred on both sides.

On certain nights I dream that Aeraleth and I are aloft above the training rings. Stormriders launch below with lightning stitched into their sails, and the elder flights circle like patient constellations. In the dream he laughs, the good laugh that rose from his belly like warm air. I wake to dark ridges and the ache of a weather-changing wing. Dreams are not oaths, but they are not lies either.

There are things I still keep: a sunstone he set in the notch of my harness, now worn smooth by my own claw; the path he favored along a spine of rock where the wind was always just right to lift us without effort; the habit of scanning the horizon not for prey alone but for travelers who look small enough to need a shadow. I have frightened raiders from refugee fires. I have landed in ruined keeps long enough to lift fallen beams with my neck and settle them where hands could not reach. No banners, no orders. Some choose to call it mercy. I call it weathering.

If the pact renews for others, let it be with better words: oaths that admit the sky has moods; leashes replaced by listened bells; a seat offered, not strapped. If it renews for me—if ever a mortal stands before my breast again, heat steady in their palm—I will know it by the way the storm quiets. Not gone; storms that go leave deserts. Quiet, like a great beast settling its weight beside the hearth, content that the house will stand the night.

Until then, I am Daranor. Elder of high places. Unmoored, yes—but not lost. My harbor is the weather, and I read it well.