The Dragon Lord's Aide Wants to Quit [BL] Chapter 459: Once Upon a Time

Those deep, light-swallowing scales that almost looked matte from a distance, along with those familiar eyes that made Riley feel as though he were looking at a much older and larger version of himself, immediately grabbed his attention.

At first, however, he couldn’t quite tell what he was actually seeing.

This time, the memory was too violent and disjointed, flashing between seemingly disconnected bursts of movement and destruction. But the longer Riley watched, the worse those fleeting images became, until there was simply no mistaking what was unfolding before him.

It was a battle.

battle.

Judging by what he could make out, the Wyvern King had been fighting Riley’s ancestral family.

His hands clenched without him even realizing it as the memory continued. Bodies littered the battlefield while blood soaked so deeply into the ground that the anxious dragon could barely tell where one ended and the other began.

Then the colossal Wyvern King donning the body of the Primordial Dragon roared.

The sound was filled with such agony that Riley almost felt it through the memory itself before the ancient creature finally crashed to the ground.

The black dragons moved immediately.

Riley stared as his ancestors used the blood covering the battlefield, including their own, to form enormous sealing arrays around the fallen being.

His hand instinctively reached toward them.

There they were.

His family.

The people he unfortunately missed out on because of circumstances, and yet were the same ones who had selflessly given him the life he had today.

Riley desperately wanted the memory to last just a little longer, if only so he could look at them properly.

But blinding light suddenly consumed the Wyvern King’s vision.

"No, wait—!"

The memory ended.

Just like the others, it dissolved into the water before the ex-mortal could hold on to it.

His hand closed around nothing.

For several seconds, Riley simply floated there.

Then, with no other choice, he continued upward.

Another memory surfaced.

This time, the Wyvern King was confronting a woman.

Riley recognized her immediately despite the differences. Her skin wasn’t yet covered in the same extensive burns she carried now, and she looked considerably less unsettling than the woman currently terrorizing Eryndra.

But there was no mistaking it. She had to be the Wyvern Queen.

"But my love!"

Her voice broke as she pleaded with him.

The Wyvern King was demanding that she stop.

"But we have to do it!" she cried, her desperation rapidly turning frantic. "If we don’t take all of them out, they will take us out! Have you forgotten what happened to your people? To you? To us?!"

She promised they wouldn’t continue forever.

They only needed to ensure their people would be safe.

After that, they could stop.

They could start again.

They could finally have the life that had been stolen from them.

Riley almost wanted to shout it directly into the memory.

She hadn’t stopped.

At this point, it would be a miracle if she could even stop.

But before Riley could settle comfortably into the belief that the woman had simply been insane from the beginning, another memory emerged.

The Wyvern King opened his eyes.

And the woman leaning over him looked like she’d been through absolute hell.

For once, the Wyvern Queen looked nothing like the terrifying ruler she’d become and far more like a distressed lover who’d nearly lost everything. The moment she realized he was awake, whatever composure she’d been clinging to was completely shattered.

Their hands immediately reached for each other, touching faces with a familiarity so intimate that Riley suddenly felt like an intruder watching something he wasn’t supposed to see.

"What happened?" the Wyvern King asked hoarsely.

The last thing he remembered was being attacked.

He’d been relatively certain he was going to die.

"No, no, no!" Rhazira sobbed, clutching him tighter. "I wouldn’t have let you die. We promised to always be together!"

Relief.

That was what Riley felt from him.

Overwhelming, almost unbearable relief that somehow, against all odds, he’d survived and the woman he loved was still beside him.

But that relief didn’t last.

The memory shifted.

And Riley finally saw what Rhazira had done.

His body had been reconstructed.

His surviving people had been altered.

Rhazira cried as she explained that she’d repaired everyone she possibly could. She’d done it alone because it wasn’t fair. None of them deserved what happened to them.

They hadn’t deserved to become victims.

The black dragon stared in wonder.

He barely had time to process that before another memory answered him.

A massacre.

White dragons descended upon the wyverns with overwhelming force.

Riley watched through the Wyvern King’s eyes as his people were slaughtered around him, the scene becoming increasingly chaotic until even his own vision began failing.

Then everything went black.

Riley felt strangely cold despite the water surrounding him, but before he could even begin trembling with anger, another memory emerged.

An unfamiliar woman stood before the Wyvern King, distraught as she told him they couldn’t be together.

She’d been told to leave.

Yet instead of responding with anger, the Wyvern King had tried to understand.

The Dragon Lord was a father, after all. He had his concerns and probably only wanted what he believed was best for his child.

But maybe they could try again.

There had to be another way to persuade him.

Riley’s eyes slowly widened.

This was the same being he’d just watched slaughtering his way through a battlefield, the very creature whose existence had loomed over Eryndra for longer than the ex-mortal could even imagine.

The one whose mere presence had nearly forced him to his knees without so much as a touch.

And yet, once upon a time, he’d been gentle.

So painfully reasonable that Riley suddenly understood just how much must’ve happened for everything to eventually end the way it did.

The light above him was getting closer now.

Yet instead of feeling relieved, Riley felt worse with every memory he passed.

By the time the final memory appeared, Riley almost didn’t want to look anymore.

But he did.

Warm, brilliant sunlight poured over breathtaking scenery untouched by war or bloodshed, and standing beneath it was a woman.

She was beautiful.

Not the burned, obsessive creature Riley knew now, nor the desperate woman who’d spent so long trying to justify atrocities that had already gone far beyond reason.

Just a woman.

She turned toward him with a radiant smile, and from somewhere within the Wyvern King’s memory, Riley heard a man’s voice call after her with unmistakable happiness.

"Rhazira!"

"Khan!"

She called back just as brightly, her smile widening as she raised a hand to wave.

And that was all.

There was no blood or war. No Primordial Dragon’s body looming over everything they’d become. No mutilated wyverns, stolen organs, or desperate attempts to prolong a life that should’ve been allowed to end.

There were only two people who’d once loved each other before everything went horribly wrong.

Riley stared at the memory until the sunlight faded and the woman disappeared with it, leaving him with nothing but names he doubted anyone alive still remembered.

And finally, he understood.

The Great War hadn’t begun with some grand desire to conquer Eryndra.

It hadn’t begun because someone wanted the Primordial Dragon’s power.

At its very root, before fear twisted into desperation and desperation became obsession, the entire tragedy had begun with love.

Riley looked upward.

The light was directly above him now.

He swam.

His hand broke through first.

The instant his fingers touched that brilliant concentration of light, the entire world around him seemed to give way.

The water collapsed.

Riley was violently tossed in every direction, losing all sense of up or down as the memories, darkness, and endless depths disappeared around him.

Then he hit something solid.

"Koff! Haughk—!"

When Riley finally came to, he found himself back on the cavern floor, coughing so violently that his entire body curled inward with each ragged breath.

He gasped between each fit, instinctively trying to force nonexistent water from his lungs even though there was nothing there. His body didn’t seem to care that the drowning had only been an illusion. As far as his reflexes were concerned, he’d just dragged himself out of an ocean.

His trembling fingers curled against the freezing stone.

Slowly, the struggling black dragon forced himself to raise his head.

The towering figure was still there.

The Wyvern King hadn’t moved.

But after everything he’d just seen, the colossal ancient no longer looked quite the same.

For a long moment, he simply stared at him, still breathing hard as the last of those memories settled painfully into place.

Then, finally, Riley understood what the big guy had been trying to tell him from the beginning.

"Khan..." he breathed. "Do you want to rest?"