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The rocky ledge is thin, crumbling. Flaky and cracked like it might give at any moment beneath his feet - send him tumbling down the steep slopes of Mount Yellia in a hail of stone and dust.
A rockslide.
Fitting, maybe. He does not know.
Eruhaben does not bother to ground himself, to wrap one clawed hand through the roots of the craggy mountain bush above him, as he looks down at the treeline below him - at the rest of the land laid out beyond that.
Guilt beats at him - mallets upon the cage of his ribs. Regret presses in on his throat until he can feel the rhythm of his heart like a drum through his arteries and hear the rush of blood in his head.
Beneath his lofty peak and quiet solitude the rivers run red and smoke chokes the sky - thick and black and roiling.
He can taste the gases on the breeze - can feel the way they rise and cluster - and nausea twists his stomach at the things carried with them.
The iron tang of blood. The acrid scent of fear and agony.
Dragons are supposedly more tolerant of mages than they are of anyone else but Eruhaben finds that the only one he despises more than mages in the current moment-
Is himself.
He failed them.
He failed them so greatly and for so long that he does not know where to place his feet to step forward. Does not know what could be done to sooth the pain that he has let fester in his lands.
His horns pierce through the skin of his scalp, forcing golden locks aside as they grow. Soaked in blood he does not care to remove. The pain of an uncontrolled transformation hardly compares to the suffering he has observed and not lifted a finger to stop.
He turned deaf ears on their screams for mercy, closed his eyes against the smoke and fire that burned loved ones to bone and cinder. Shut his mind to the way the natural mana entrenched into every grain of soil and stretch of forest wailed at the injustice of it - at the atrocity.
Cut from his heart the way the mana cradled even those who could not feel it, who could not hear it’s grief and fury and the way it raged on behalf of them - whose voices had been stolen and locked away long ago.
He had not stepped down from Mount Yellia. Not once.
Not when the armies had marched in from the west like an unnatural tide into shore, baring flags of silver and gold. A tsunami of glinting blades and subjugation upon horseback and upon foot.
Not even when the earth had begun to scream, when the mana had begun to shake and thrash - fighting the directions it normally heeded.
He should have. At least to look.
Dragons are made to keep the world in balance and a balanced world does not scream.
The air tastes of rot and sorrow even so high up. The clouds hang just above his head, their chilling mist settling in his ears like whispers.
Like promises he never made and did not keep.
He wishes it would storm - to strike the precarious ledge and force him into falling down to the ground below. Like a body off the Tower, flailing helpless in the wind with nothing but certain death to cushion the impact.
The guilt beats louder, drumming to the tune of songs he has no right to carry for the way he left them to die but cannot let go of all the same.
His neck aches and it reaches up to his head like the cold grasping hands of the dead. He tugs harshly at his hair in a sole attempt to get the feeling to recede, a far cry from the gentle curve of the comb that he has not used since he was ten and watching the pyre blaze through the winter night.
The blood from his horns smears on his talons, staining the golden scales stretching down his fingers. In a time before he abandoned people to extinction the blood would have been cleaned, carefully scrubbed out of the grooves by strong hands long before it could become tacky and dry.
The rivers beneath him are beginning to flow clear and the permanent midnight made of misery fades slowly towards a new dawn.
He does not move from the cliff ledge.
He does not step down from Mount Yellia.
The guilt buries him in a rockslide.