Ashes, Ashes

Writers: Heather
Date Posted: 1st June 2024

Characters: Zaverin
Description: A day in the life of Zaverin.
Location: Barrier Lake Weyr
Date: month 12, day 28 of Turn 11

Soaring. He was soaring. Wind was whipping across his cheeks, pressing
his riding goggles more snugly against his eyes. Euvimeth's wings
caught another upward current, launching them at a clump of Thread. A
burst of flame from the bronze's jaws and nothing but ashes remained
of their mortal enemy. They were glorious and triumphant in their
battle against the silvery spores!

Tilting. The world was tilting. They were buffeted by the wind,
throwing them sideways in the Thread-darkened skies.

Screaming. Euvimeth was screaming. A sickening crunch of bones
shattering became a sound that reverberated through his skull.

**Euvimeth!** The cry in his brain was panicked.

}:Z'vin!:{ Euvimeth's brassy voice called back. His voice was
fading... fading...

Gone.

With a rush, Zaverin bolted upright in the bed. Sweat-soaked sheets
pooled around his waist as he gasped for air, his lungs wheezing with
effort.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. The old children's chant played
hauntingly in his mind, as it always did when he had this dream.

For a moment he tried to remain as still as possible, savoring the
sound of his dragon's voice in his mind. He only ever heard Euvimeth
in his dreams these days, and while the dreams were always of
Euvimeth's death, Zaverin tried to savor them. The nightmares were the
only time Zaverin felt like _Z'vin_ again. The only time he was whole,
despite his world shattering around him.

Rolling out of his bed, he padded barefoot across his impossibly small
room and dunked his face in the washbasin. A weyr. That was the other
thing he had lost when Euvimeth died. He remembered how he used to
walk out onto his ledge in the mornings and enjoy a cup of klah as he
looked over the stillness of the Weyr beneath him. Now he lived in a
small journeyman healer's room that didn't even have a window.

"Let's get this day started," he said to himself. He talked to himself
a lot, in place of talking to Euvimeth. He hadn't realized how often
he had carried on side conversations in his mind until his dragon was
gone. Mindhealers had suggested he try to get a firelizard, to help
ease the loneliness, but Zaverin didn't want a firelizard. He never
wanted to love something that could be taken from him ever again.

Tying his hair back out of his face, he washed away the sweat left
from the nightmare, pulled on his healer's tunic and pants, and left
the small grave-like room he occupied.

The earlier morning Weyr staff was already busy in the mostly empty
Dining Cavern. He avoided their sympathetic eyes as he poured himself
klah and grabbed a sweetroll. He didn't bother to find a seat but
walked straight to the infirmary, eating and drinking as he walked.

"Morning," he rasped softly to the other journeyman working the front
desk of the infirmary. "Quiet night?" he asked.

"Very. I was just getting ready to make my final rounds on the
patients before heading out," the other man said around a yawn.

"I'll do it. You go ahead and take off," Zaverin said, finishing his
sweetroll in one last bite. He turned and began washing his hands with
a mixture of water and redwort.

"You sure, man?"

"Absolutely."

"Thanks! Eseram is going to be surprised when I get home early," he
said, beaming as he hastily tidied up the front desk. "I'm just going
to slide right into bed behind him and give him a _big_ surprise this
morning."

Zaverin waved over his shoulder at the departing journeyman without
even looking up.

Grabbing the clipboards of the seven patients in the infirmary,
Zaverin glanced over the sheet of the first one as he stood just
outside the patient's room.

**Dragonrider. Injured in threadfall. Broken ribs. Punctured lung.**
His jaw tightened as he looked at the symptoms that were nearly a
mirror of the ones he had sustained when he'd lost Euvimeth.

Swallowing past the lump in his throat, Zaverin rolled his head,
loosening the tense muscles in his neck and shoulders. **Just go in
and do your job,** he coached himself.

"Good morning R'glyn, I'm just going to check on your respiration rate
and then you can go back to resting," he said in a soft, hushed tone
as he entered the room. The greenrider lying in the bed nodded but
didn't speak. His face was bruised and swollen.

"Can I.. Can I get something for the pain?" R'glyn's voice was a
barely audible croak.

Zaverin looked down at the chart in his hands. "It says you just had
some fellis a candlemark ago."

"Please," the agonized word burst from the greenrider's lips in a sob.

Zaverin glanced over his shoulder. He was still the only healer on duty.

"One second," he murmured. Taking a small bottle of fellis from the
storeroom, he put a little tick mark on the inventory sign-out sheet,
and then beside it wrote, "Broken. Discarded."

"Here we go." He returned to R'glyn's room. Measuring out a dose,
Zaverin watched as the greenrider swallowed it down gratefully.

"Thank you," R'glyn panted.

"Of course."

Zaverin watched as the greenrider's eyes slid shut.

Looking down at the glass bottle, Zaverin opened his hand and observed
the falling of the bottle and the shattering of glass on the floor.

"Oops," he whispered softly, before sweeping the glass up and throwing
it away. "Clumsy me."

Last updated on the June 1st 2024

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Ashes, Ashes