Not Yours (2/2)

Writers: Iluva
Date Posted: 14th October 2025

Characters: A'garyn
Description: Aegaryn doesn’t Impress
Location: Dragonsfall Weyr
Date: month 12, day 14 of Turn 12
Notes: Cursing, follows after "He's Mine" CW for trauma
Mentioned: K’valas, N’dhavi, Akadja, Hesbia, L’val, Yvase

A'garyn

Despite being unable to see anything right now, Aegaryn forced his gaze back to the clutch.

The only way he could go that way was with a dragon.

Their presences were fading and the screeching steadily swallowed up with it, and still half-wondering into what, if Kav’s wounds were really as shallow as they looked, Aegaryn felt the stings of congratulations flowing around him.

It all merged into a single wall of sound. A steady flow of Impressions, one that felt like it wanted to flatten him into the boiling earth. The earth didn’t need either of them to start spinning again all on its own. His teeth grit. More names shouted into the sky. Nangath and Nazoth, Morivath and Mactallath, words that flew out of some black unknown and out into existence-- but none able to cut the way Sazikoth’s had cut.

Aegaryn stood stone-faced.

Guilt and panic wove in, merging with a shame he could barely touch, not without feeling like he'd fall apart, but they were sliding through him all the same. Faces kept lighting up around him, a strange, sheer delight in the vast sea of white. This whole stupid venture had been his idea. Coming here after the flood. Sticking around for months afterward, getting Searched, not once thinking that dragons would ever look at them, ever want them, despite whatever Searches and riders and the Weyr said.

His idea to enter Candidacy. His idea to be standing here, in the same spot he and Kavalas just-- no, K’valas? K'val? Aegaryn didn't know his name anymore. It had been his idea, and now Kav lay at the end of it.

Over half of the meager clutch had split already by the time he could see it properly again, trying to breathe.

He watched, in a detached sort of way, as Hesbia was found by a blue. It looked natural, her happiness. Brittle fragments littered the hot sands. Eggs shed hurriedly, others with difficulty, and viscous fluid pooled shiny and wet, drying quickly in the heat. Everything was white-washed in the buzz of light, hum of dragon, nothing but bodies in blinding white robes.

He shouldn’t have been surprised. In a forest of people in white, the color of blank canvases and new starts, crowded into loose clusters across the heated hatching field, there was no redemption for his actions - now, or then.

Still, desperation meant Aegaryn studied the remaining dragonets intently, only the odd flash of blue or green now-- one drawn into a cluster here, another there. There had been a couple browns, and a bronze, just the one-- straight to Naldhavi. Aegaryn didn’t notice Akadja’s reaction, if he had one. Everything was lost in heat and the forest of people crowded around him. He barely heard the boom of a bronze, the aftereffect being the only outlier. Kyverth’s echo rained down on top of them like the storm outside, a brutal and unforgiving wallow of celebration, temporarily breaking the spell long enough to see the Stands cheering for the young Weyrgirl. Wingleader’s daughter, he recalled. She had her green, as well.

Then, without any sort of ceremony, warning, or sign, they were done.

Empty shells, broken homes everywhere. None came his way, and certainly none had considered him across the sizzling sea of sand, even when he tried to get his mind to stop the racing for a moment and remember how he had approached Zolta when she tore out of her shell, a ball of hissing gold. How he had felt, how true elation used to feel.

His stomach roiled. Fuck. He was sorry. He was so sorry, Kav. The whole thing was over so quickly. Aegaryn realized, standing there, that Kav would realize he wasn’t coming at some point. He still didn't know how he was supposed to walk out here without him. How he was going to go back to the barracks and change out of a stupid white sheet when Kavalas’ was streaked red. But Kavalas was with Sazikoth. He was Sazikoth's. And not only that, he’d let him down. He wasn’t suitable; the dragons had known it. Feyonth, Azadath. Sazikoth. The dragons knew.

The whole thing was over so quickly, and there had been no need for more, Aegaryn decided. Fifteen had found theirs-- an event worthy of any Weyr’s celebrations. The first one had prowled, stolen, snapped.

The only reason he lingered was because when he left the Sands, when he did finally _move_, the world would try to fall into its new place.

A leaden growl that rattled the cavern walls came rolling overhead. Thunder. The instinct to destroy something precious surged up in him, spiking enough to remind him of what it meant again. He wasn’t worthy. He'd known that-- and that had been fine.

But faces turned toward him in the bleachers, reminding him he was still down here. Still breathing. But the panic and rage didn’t fade, instead congealing into a thick black tar that filled his chest, itching for release, and it wasn't that his feet burned-- but that everything did.

His breath, eyes, a cold sweat snapping through him in defiance of the heat.

Memories pressed in-- things that didn’t belong here, things he’d buried with Dren. Parts of himself that should’ve stayed dead.

Aegaryn wasn’t gentle. He wasn’t respectful. He was enraged. He shoved through the guests fizzling out into the merriment, snarled when someone bumped him, and by the time the heat of the Sands broke over the cooler air of the corridors, the Weyrbowl, the image of that green-- _Kav’s_ green-- still burned behind his eyes. That mangled ferocity, that choice. That _bond_.

He didn’t remember reaching the barracks, only that the image had dispersed from his senses, taking Kavalas with her, all the while something else stirred.

Running his hands through his dark hair, Aegaryn tried to steady himself, tried to breathe.

Sazikoth might have taken Kav, but her choice also severed every thread he’d pulled over himself these past five turns. She’d unknowingly uncovered a fracture. A lie.

The barracks were completely dead. Rows of bunks warped before him, but Aegaryn didn't stumble. Just walked to the section where most of the holdless men slept. The place looked ransacked even by their standards, and the air hung heavy and silent between the stone walls, beneath the raging storm.

Curled in the center of his bed, Zolta’s head immediately came up, chirruping a greeting. Her eyes swirled grey. Troubled, sensing the shift in him-- the wrongness gathering there.

Aegaryn didn’t speak. He shed the robe with slow, deliberate hands, his jaw set, and stared at the few items they’d scraped together these past months-- tools, socks, scraps of clothing from the weavers’ discards, the blunted knives they’d somehow managed to still have on them when they’d arrived from the caves. Each had been chosen carefully-- items of use, things they would need, all hoarded in an old busted trunk. Things meant for a life that was not going to happen; a small collection of things that had almost meant something.

That quiet knowledge ripped through him again, the same as it had been during that too-short Hatching, the same as when Sazikoth’s snarling voice entered his head. It had been over from the start.

Only now, the pain of losing Kav to the Weyr was dragging something else with it-- shame, but something old stirring awake, and alive.

It crawled up through the wreckage of him like he was nothing. In Aegaryn's mind's eye, he saw the almost innocent stillness of Drenorik’s face. The dark slant of his eyebrows had been caught slightly upward, as if in wry amusement to something either of them had said. It pulsed darkly against his thoughts, and in a sudden spike of panic, all he wanted-- then, and now-- was to peel out of his own skin, let his viscera tear and tendons snap and leave everything that hid in it behind, until it was no longer his brother’s face.

He could still hear Sazikoth's screech.

Last updated on the October 19th 2025

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Not Yours (2/2)