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The shadow of the slain Dragon King looms over her, dark and foreboding against the hopeful sunset behind him. Around her, soldiers in blue, silver and white shuffle about, helping the wounded to their feet and laying sheets over the fallen. Amaya knows she should get up, help, search until Callum and Ezran and even Rayla are safe in her arms, but she doesn’t move.
Her ribs ache when she breathes outwards and she groans, trying to shift where she had fallen back against a rock and passed out. Now, with her hand tucked to her side, she can only stare up at the stone caricature before her.
Avizandum’s claw is forever outstretched, pointing to the top of the Storm Spire that lays so close yet so far in the distance. Amaya blinks, head fuzzy from where her helmet softened the blow before it was ripped off her head and she lets herself trace from his claw to his muzzle, down to where it all began.
Sarai’s spear.
Her chest aches at that - not a battle wound, but something deeper. Older. Instead of an injury it’s healed over and scabbed, a scar, and Amaya stares up at her sister’s spear, buried deep in Avizandum’s chest.
A second shadow looms over her. When Amaya turns her head to the right, wincing at the light that shines into her face, it’s only the Sunfire elf, lips moving, hand extended.
Janai, Amaya knows her now as.
A week ago, she never would have wrapped her hand around Janai’s wrist, letting the elf pull her to her feet. Her stomach lurches and Amaya stumbles but Janai is there, hands on her forearms, holding her up.
Amaya breathes out and lifts her face. The sunset washes over her, bathing both her features and Avizandum’s in glowing ambers and she thinks dimly as he studies his that the late King of the Dragons is not so different from the late Queen of Katolis. After all, miles away in Katolis stands Sarai’s monument, a remembrance of her passing. How is this any different?
What is the difference, in the end? Simply miles of barren ground, two sides of a border, a river of lava?
There’s a tap on her shoulder and Amaya looks to her right. Janai’s lips move, eyebrows furrowed, the yellow henna on her cheeks creasing with how her mouth moves. “Are you alright?”
Amaya spares a single glance back at Avizandum as if she’s trying to memorize his face - and, perhaps, she is. She does the same to Sarai’s memorial when she visits and as she stands under the shadow the King of the Dragon casts, welcoming the end of an era and ushering in one of peace and acceptance instead, Amaya finds herself.
She’s despised elves for so long, sworn to herself to put her sword through every single one until Sarai was avenged. But the King of the Dragons is gone, too, and where is she?
Continuing the cycle of hatred, the cycle of fear, the cycle of revenge.
It was that cycle of revenge that killed her sister, that cycle of revenge that drove Harrow to put Sarai’s spear straight through Avizandum’s chest. That cycle of revenge that tore a baby dragon from his heartbroken mother, that took a father from two sons, ripped a sister from another, that cycle of revenge that parted lava and led an army straight into the heart of Xadia.
That cycle of revenge that led her here, to those exact moment in time. That cycle of revenge that, Amaya swears to herself, will end with her. Now.
Amaya looks down at her hand, clasped within Janai’s, and squeezes. Janai is smiling when she looks up, armor dirty and blood smeared over her cheek, and Amaya nods her head.
Yes.
She turns away from Avizandum. Her steps are careful but more surer than they have been in a long time - a decade, a lifetime - and Janai stays with her all the while.
The sun sets in the distance. Amaya does not forget the Dragon King’s face, nor her sister’s, nor the feeling of Janai’s palm against her own through the burnt fabric of her glove.
It is enough, Amaya realizes, as the Dragon Queen rumbles and she turns her face up, into the light, facing her destiny. It is enough, Amaya realizes, as she holds Janai’s hand and watches the world she’s known fade away into something kinder. Something softer.
It is enough.