14

I had enough stamina for three dragons. Stamina was one of the stats I'd focused on. I'd done a good job of making myself a tank. I could handle more hits then anyone I knew. Ethan was the only one who could compete with me, and that was because he was just as strong as me whenever he wore his scales. 

He was half as strong without them. He didn't borrow my power like he used to. It was his own. He sacrificed a part of his soul to gain this power, and I'd given him the piece he sacrificed so he could survive. With how severely he'd damaged his soul he wouldn't have survived without it. 

It wasn't that a human soul was weaker then a dragons soul. That was one of the things that made me want to make all intelligent races at least try to get along. All souls were pretty much equal. I knew that better then anyone else. The aura around a persons body was an impression of their soul. 

Granted I'd only figured this out recently, but it was a very profound realization. I figured it out when I took the time to observe some of the creatures I'd killed. Their aura faded as their soul left their body. It was different from what I expected. It didn't get sucked down into the core like I expected. It lingered in the body until it just blinked out of existence. 

Did that mean there was no heaven or hell? I didn't really care. Notions like religion or gods didn't really appeal to me. If there were really such all powerful gods out there then why would they allow something like this to happen to those that followed them in the first place. Even the will of the world gave more shits about what happened on her surface than some so called gods. 

A pang of pain shot through my head. Will of the world? Did I meet something like that? I don't understand. Was something blocking my memory? 

These thoughts quickly faded. Leaving behind only a faint awareness of them. As much as I tried to pursue that line of thought again I found that I simply couldn't. I couldn't find the thoughts that caused pain to shock through my head. What was I thinking about?

I rubbed my horns on my closed fist as I tried to massage the thoughts back into my head. Nothing came. Not that massaging my head was enough to bring thoughts back into my head before. It was something of a habit. I probably did it more then I realized. 

I snorted to myself as I raised my head back up to my full height. I could reflect on why my thoughts sharply steered away from whatever I'd been thinking about before. It was time to leave. We'd make the last twelve hours of our journey in one last push. I pushed off the deck of the ship first. 

Circling twice before coming Aurora joined me. One more rotation, and all the wyverns were mounted, and ready to go as well. The crew seem to breathe a collective sigh of relief as we soared away. They'd avoided interacting with us this entire time. We'd allowed it. 

Now was not the time to push for interaction between us, and the general population. I didn't want to give the wrong impression that we were actually friendly. One thing I'd learned about dragons so far with the small sample size of the three of us was that we were only openly friendly with a select few. We didn't even really like other dragons enough to go out, and socialize with our own kind. I respected Copper, and Aurora for the dragons they were, and I would speak to them as they wanted, but I didn't actively seek them out. 

Although that might change now that Aurora had officially become my other half. We were linked body, and soul. It was nice since we still had our own separate minds, but we didn't need to see into each others minds to know what the other was thinking. Although I got the feeling we could open up our minds to allow each other in if we so desired. That wasn't the point of our bond though so I did think it would be more difficult then it would be normally like when I linked to my bonded. 

Our bond was different then the bond I had with my riders. Socializing with humans hit me mentally about the same as socializing with an entire crowd at once. It was near impossible to chat with that many people, and not reach a level of mental exhaustion rather quickly. I wasn't the only one that had some degree of antisocial personality. Aurora, and Copper also shared my aversion to speaking to more then a few humans at a time. 

Our bonded were really the only exception to this rule. Even if they were all together as a group that didn't matter. I still had no problem speaking with them all. Even if it was all of them at once. Normal humans seemed to irritate me if they spoke to me as casually as my bonded did. 

I wished that that wasn't the case, but I couldn't really help what I felt. If all dragons were as antisocial as I was then they'd happily hole up somewhere instead of speaking to the humans. It wasn't that I didn't know how to talk to people. I simply didn't want to talk to them. When I was a hatching I spoke to them more willingly. 

Hatchlings sought to learn so talking was just one of the things we did to learn. We had too much energy to focus our attention on a single person. Not because we didn't like the idea of focusing on a single person. We simply weren't capable of that kind of focus. I was an exception to this rule simply because I had a more mature mind to start with.