I Almost Confessed That Night

I saw you before you ever saw me. You were running away just as everyone did, a boy chasing across a field, hurrying to find shelter. You were nothing to me but a flicker of warmth on the ground below. With the rhythmic pounding of my wings matching my heartbeat, and the clouds parting as I pierced them, I didn’t know then that I was watching the shape of my own undoing.

And how could I have known?

I was fire and scale and three hundred years of restraint. An Ember Queen, dragon by birth, human at will. Yet when I look back, I wonder if that’s the day I realised who I truly could be. If deep down in some part of me there was a spark that maybe I hadn’t yet learned to master. Was there an image of my future I had missed; a marker of what you would become to me and of what I myself, would ache for?

The next time we met, I had a crown, a throne and a kingdom, and I’d spent my whole life learning my role. I wanted for nothing. That was until I saw you again. You had prospered and were worthy of entering my circle. And when you looked at me in the soft, pliable human shape I wore like a borrowed cloak, my reasons for refusing you slowly fell away. You asked to see me again and again. I told myself my acknowledgement was curiosity, then I told myself it was harmless, then I stopped telling myself anything at all. Because by the third time we met, I knew I’d been lying to myself.

How I wish I had rejected you then.

I should have said no. After all, I had said no to kings and to armies. I’d refused an entire court that thought it knew better than I did what a queen should want. But I couldn’t say it to you. When you asked, standing too close, your voice careful, like you were afraid I might startle and flee, I said yes before I’d decided to say anything at all.

I was uncertain. You were naive.

Do you remember how I flinched the first time you reached for my hand? You thought it was shyness. It wasn’t. It was fear. The particular fear of something ancient and armoured, suddenly aware of how easily I could be destroyed. The appearance I wore to walk among you, to sit across from you at a table and to pretend that I was only a woman, left me weak. Every time I changed it broke me just that little bit more. A physical change, tangible, unlike the change in my heart that couldn’t be seen or measured by anyone but me.

Alone at night, I was restless, aching, desperate. You were becoming the part of my destiny that would ruin me. In the dead of night, I was more fearful that you wouldn’t.

On the morning of the day of the lantern festival I decided that it was time to tell you the truth. I rehearsed my confession in the mirror; just a girl getting ready to declare her first true love. Believe me, if I had known how it would feel, how it would wound, I would have walked away long before then. But human feelings had clouded my judgement, and I could never have imagined how easily my absence of words would convince you that I didn’t want you, and how easily I would let them. In my mind you took me in your arms as I spoke the truth, in reality I watched the hope leave your face like a candle guttering in the wind.

Your presence broke me, my true self had not been as fragile since your grandfathers were born. Every hour I spent with you, I spent unguarded. I told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself you were worth it. I let myself believe we could work and in those early morning hours I built a whole future out of our stolen evenings. You, me, some version of my kingdom that could bend without breaking. Some version of you that could love a queen who was not what she seemed. I constructed our future in my head, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, the way children build things out of driftwood and conviction. Refusing to notice how flimsy it was, how the tide was already coming in, dark waves of prophecy rolling in to warn me of my foolishness.

My advisors noticed it before I let myself admit what was happening. I saw the way they watched me when I returned from our meetings. I was lighter, careless, forgetting to guard my expression. I saw the warnings gathering behind their eyes, advice they didn’t yet dare to say aloud. They began to murmur of the queen who could not master herself. I closed my ears to their whispers, instead I told myself that some risks were worth taking and that you were one of them. I thought love might be stronger than fear. I thought I was ready to find out.