▸ Column · The Age of the Aspects — a dragonflight brood-gathering beneath the spires of Wyrmrest Temple
ALEXSTRASZA replies.
Replied to by Alexstrasza, with a rebuttal from Deathwing.
The letter
Life-Binder — every turning of the year, my mate's mother, the brood-matron Bronwynne, gathers nineteen of us beneath the spires of Wyrmrest and decrees that we don matching molted-scale mantles for a "candid" remembrance-portrait that consumes half a day and an oath of silence. This season she has elevated it: hooded cloaks with embroidered tails and little antlered crests, theme declared "The Cozy Grove Brood," non-negotiable, pressed in advance, no mercy for my brother-in-law's splinted wing nor my cousin who sickens at the honey-mead they use as a prop. I am no hatchling — I am full-grown — and last week I was made to rehearse my "surprised but delighted" face before the whole flight. My mate says refusing would "shatter Bronwynne's heart and the whole wall of portraits above her stair," where a frame already waits with my name on the mat. How do I escape the antler-crest without being forever cropped from the brood?
Alexstrasza replies
Oh, little one. Half a day in an embroidered tail, and you have written to the Aspect of Life as though it were a siege at the gates of Wyrmrest. Come, sit. Let me tell you what I see, who have watched ten thousand winters gather and scatter.
I had a clutch once. They were taken from me, and corrupted before my eyes, and I would give the whole long memory of my reign for one more foolish afternoon counting them in a single room, whole, complaining, ridiculous. That counting — that is what your Bronwynne is doing. She is a matriarch who has noticed, perhaps without saying it, that nineteen will not always be gatherable. The antlers are absurd, dear one. The wanting beneath them is the oldest love there is.
So wear the crest. It costs you an afternoon; it costs her nothing to lose you from that wall. But do not wear it mutely. Go to her — gently, the way I would have you tend anything — and ask that your cousin be spared the honey-mead, your brother his bound wing's strain. She will hear it. Mothers who arrange walls are arranging against the day the wall is all that's left. Choose the gathering, little one. Do not let a tail make a stranger of your kin.
— Alexstrasza
Deathwing weighs in
Let it all fall, then — the cloaks moth-eaten, the frames split, "The Cozy Grove Brood" revealed as what it is: order painted thin over the ruin that takes every portrait in the end. That is the whisper, and I know its patient voice; I burned a world heeding it and found no peace in the ash, only silence.
So refuse it. But mark who truly holds the antler-crest to your throat — not Bronwynne and her foolish tails. Your own mate, who would crop you from the wall to keep a peace that costs only you. Name that. Then do as my sister says: set down the quarrel, not the kin. I confused those two once. Look what is left of me.
— Deathwing
▸ Read next