Undertow (1/2)
Dragonsfall Weyr
Amber Hills Hold
Vintner Hall
Healer Hall
Hidden Meadows
Dolphin Cove Weyr
Dolphin Hall
Emerald Falls Hold
Harper Hall
Printer Hall
Green Valley Hold
Leeward Lagoon Hold
Barrier Lake Weyr
Sunstone Seahold
Citrus Bay Hold
Writers: Iluva
Date Posted: 3rd May 2026
Characters: A'garyn, Drenorik
Description: Aegaryn remembers his last day with his brother
Location: Dragonsfall Weyr, Elsewhere on Pern
Date: month 12, day 14 of Turn 12
Notes: Mentioned: K’valas, Dorix (not by name), Sybana
Part 1 of 2. This series follows "He's Mine" and "Not Yours" from Galgaith's hatching, and precedes "Still Water" and "Changing Tides"
It happened quickly.
His heart was still racing when the memory surfaced -- not gently, but the way things did when every defence was broken. Drenorik's face. The dark slant of his brows caught slightly upward, that familiar wry look, the faint amusement that spoke without words. Like he knew something Aegaryn didn't.
The walls around him shimmered, wavering like water, and then fell away.
-------Flashback 6 turns ago-------
A narrow ship rested in the harbour, half eclipsed by the high granite walls of the Hold's main building, a skein of restless avians lazily looping its mast, impatient and indignant, their calls too thin to carry. The yellow and orange sails had been furled and folded tightly away, and sunlight swayed over the jittery water, skipping from one place to another. On the deck it lay in bright, smudgy mirrors where rain had found it on its way in, pieces of sky painting its broad boards like a careless child’s hand. Men shouted from one end to the men working at the other. It was mid-day and the catch bulged in the nets. More hands had gathered on the dock, others already hefting boxed cargo from the warehouses in preparation to be loaded up.
That evening or the next morning the sails would jump wide again. The suntanned ship would heave away from the dock, slip behind the hard stone angles of the main building and its high twinned spires, and streak away, hungry for another hunt on the Azov waters. And then it would be gone again, buried in the horizon.
Aegaryn patted Amak’s neck, and the runner snorted, shifting in the deep tracts of mud, darker and damper in the shadow of the trees. Ready. Aegaryn could almost feel the cold curl of the wind on his face this far up from the sea. The seconds lengthened, a blur of shouts drifting up from the harbour, the sounds of home. And then, with a faint exhale, he realized everything was different about home now. His eyes lingered on figures winding down toward the Hold, carefully avoiding the flat shine of puddles. Others meandering along the docks. But then they were gone. They didn’t exist, and it was almost like they never had. Not when he saw him.
Esher.
Esher was a shiny bay gelding, long-legged and sure-footed, and he moved through the muck with unhurried ease. His three white socks were submerged, leaving only his milky white blaze to peek through the forelock. Drenorik nodded in greeting, as if Aegaryn had been invisible to anyone else until then. His dark brows angled up slightly -- that familiar wry look, as if he already knew something Aegaryn didn't. They exchanged big grins, and then, turning Amak, the two runnerbeasts trekked up the winding wet road that led out of Opal Cove.
They climbed a low hill, keeping watch for any eyes that were particularly leery and might run to tell someone higher up, but there were few who weren’t either resting or taking a meal at this hour. With emboldened looks, they went on.
Passing a small group leaned against a pasture fence, their gloves tucked in their pockets, they waved. Aegaryn couldn’t help it-- he waved back, his excitement earning exasperated disbelief from his brother. News of Drenorik’s Search had somehow filled the Hold the way the seawind filled sails.
Aegaryn tipped a grin at his brother then, a sly, conspiratorial look.
Then a bottle appeared.
Drenorik scoffed, his voice half-laugh, half-horror. “Faranth, Aeg. You didn’t.”
“If we’re going to celebrate, then we do it properly.” Aegaryn took a long swig, brandishing it at him. “It’s not optional.”
“You really are a sucker for a punishment.” Turning and glancing back at the group, Drenorik nevertheless tipped the bottle up. He coughed and, with a vigorous shake of his head, the way a canine did after a swim, squinted at the suspicious lack of label. “Shells, what is that? Pure alcohol?”
“Stolzart's goodbye present. He thinks I gave it to you unopened, so if he asks…”
“Yeah, yeah.” Drenorik's head shook slowly -- disapprovingly now. “You're lucky Petraf's in charge of you over this, Aeg.”
Aegaryn’s expression shifted. “Oh, I know.”
“Father would tan your hide himself,” his brother muttered. Nothing Aegaryn didn’t know already, either. Dren took another sip, grimacing slightly. He looked off to the west, scanning the immense sprawl of the land and the swirl of avians and the dark smear of trees, like he expected something to appear there at its edge. After a moment, he turned that gaze on his brother. “Hey, I saw Warelin’s face. You got him good.”
At that Aegaryn carefully avoided Dren’s eye, aware only of the hard glass and noisy slosh pressing into his hands. He could feel his eyes on him as he urged Amak ahead a little, feel them when he leaned over the blue-roan canvas of his neck and tried to look like he was sizing up the deepening mud. Though his brother had seen the mark on his chin, he didn’t want him to stare. For a second he thought Dren might reach over to inspect it or to chastise or start interrogating him, but instead he sighed and adjusted the reins and mumbled something to Esher before his tone turned curious, unforced, and he said, “You still like being down there with all the men? Everyone jammed in there together?”
Aegaryn didn’t think there was a right answer to that. Still bent over Amak, he shot a flat look over his shoulder, almost bored. “How is that any different from where you're going?”
Drenorik laughed; his teeth were a bright slash in the soft darkness of his fledgling beard. Esher tossed his head as if in agreement.
Turns together and countless rides had made them comfortable in a saddle, but Drenorik had the balanced fluidity that even some older riders had yet to master. He knew how to hold himself, almost implicitly, almost as if he would have always known how to sit even if he hadn’t grown up in Opal Cove and didn’t know runners the way he did. His dark eyes roamed easily, kindly over everything, his face handsome and open. His shoulders were broadening, broader still in the dark jacket, yet even framed in that fine-tailored leather, he had the windswept look of someone descending down a mountain pass, his hair curling loose at this length, unflappable, unbothered by the elements. He moved with Esher, always checking his comfort with the reins' tightness, never once questioning his runner’s abilities over any terrain. He’d fit in fine at Dragonsfall, Aegaryn knew.
After days of endless rain the ground was still soggy, the wet world reluctant to dry. Amak shook an itch as they slowly headed further up the hill, dark mane fluttering long and loose in the breeze. They had been beset with so much rain that the runners had to yank their hooves up in a few places, spraying the others' legs with dashes of brown muck. Too thick to comfortably trot yet. But everything was warming finally. The mid-day sun scattered light evenly over them, pushing away the gloom of old clouds. They turned off from the main road and down a familiar, well-worn path bisecting huge swathes of cotholds. Little homes nestled in the embrace of big land. Pastures boasting grunting heardbeasts, each flicking their tails and nibbling the grass, lay between them and the slide of the river, and further on, tiny twists of chimney smoke whispered over the treetops into a thin blue sky.
Aegaryn watched the far-off dots of men chopping logs into splints and piling them high onto a wide wooden cart at the forest’s edge. A few smaller dots -- children -- were playing at the water’s edge, tiny shrieks carrying in between the slow chert, chert, chert of an axe. He could hear the voices in the adjacent field and, somewhere beyond, music. A woman singing. Unpolished, unconcerned, and fierce in feeling, though too far to discern what.
Drenorik let out a long, pleased sigh, the land spreading wider, wilder around them. A family in the next field waved, and this time he waved back. “So, how long have we got? Before Petraf comes looking for you?”
Aegaryn reached to hand back the bottle. “Got cover till after dinner. Stomach sick, or something.” There was a wrinkle in his nose when he straightened. “Then it’s cleaning duty for the rest of my days.”
Dren looked at him for a long moment. “Thanks, man.”
“Of course.” Aegaryn nodded, smiling.
The bottle made its rounds a few more times before the drumming of hooves finally took over. They crossed the bridge over a small rocky stream and headed to where the spine of the mountains ran blue and high into the pale of the sky, far into the west behind thick walls of forest. There were fewer people, then none.
In Aegaryn’s hand the half-empty bottle winked between the shifting shadows of the grove.
From the belly up, their runners were pristine, the assiduous work of the stables. Esher’s coat gleamed a bold, fiery red through the patchworked light streaming down through the leafed ceiling. His black mane and head drinking the sun, Amak shone like a piece of hot sintered coal, a softer shade of silver awakening at his edges. They picked their way through an old route that had wilded over slightly from time and drenching rains. They crossed fallen logs and thickets of thorny brush that made the runners snort. Alcohol stung the air and mingled with the ripe, damp smell of earth.
As the canopy grew sparse, fewer shadows falling into their dark leather jackets, the trail began to open with a long, lazy yawn.
Their excitement ratcheted up. They spread out, running their touch over thick leaves and tossing the bottle between them, and Aegaryn stretched into the openness and sun. The Hold was far behind them, all order, all rigid domesticity -- the things that made getting out even for a while all the sweeter. For a time, it really was just them.
Just ahead, his hair half-ringed with pale sunlight, Drenorik hummed a few bars of whatever that woman had been singing, clearly of the same mind.
“Hey, where’s Z?” he asked at one point.
“Alenni.”
Dren nodded, about to respond, when his runner veered abruptly sideways. A tunnelsnake darted out of the tangled brush. It hissed and swiped, and Esher shied, hurrying past in a few jerking steps. He soothed him for a moment, the threat gone, before looking back over his shoulder, curious. “Gavran or… ?”
Aegaryn took a swig, his expression scrunched up. “Did not ask.”
His gaze tracked upward. He frowned a little, thinking of the coy glances and the rules of courtship that made their sister look faintly flushed and breathless when it was someone she fancied or the polite discomfort of dealing with someone she secretly wished wouldn’t fancy her at all. Like watching a game through a window.
Near the edge of the trees, Aegaryn grabbed a low-hanging branch, roughly cracking a thin shoot and shucking its leaves. In short order he’d fashioned himself a fine switch. Drenorik did the same, and they immediately set about dodging the other’s weapon, lightly smacking each other down across a huge sloping pasture, laughing loud. Theirs was an old ritual. Two kids who were up to no good. Neither practical nor practiced enough in recent months, but the ride together was thrill enough these days.
But Dren was destined for Dragonsfall now.
In the back of Aegaryn’s mind there it was -- and then it was all he could think about, pushing forward through every beat of silence and dull clunk of hooves.
Drenorik landed a quick, deft smack to his shoulder, triumphant.
“Ow!” Aegaryn lashed back at him but missed.
In any other place, on any other day, it would look grey and depressing in its barrenness. The babble of the river got left with the trees, and the grassland opened into smooth, rolling ripples of drier vegetation that even the brilliant blue of the sky couldn’t convince to shine green. Livestock were moved elsewhere in these months. The grass here could recover, and the weather sometimes shifted into patterns of storms and stagnation that rendered growing anything else too pointless to attempt.
They passed solitary fence posts, stark and bare, where brittle boards had been taken down and were slowly being replaced. A mish-mash of attempts, like it was a different set of hands doing it every time. None today. None since the last time they were here, either.
Just vastness, the continent spilling open to them the further they went. A sense of the world unhemmed by buildings, by thought, or by expectation. The sea loomed without interruption at the edge of the cliffs, far and yet close enough to feel its draw even from here.
Aegaryn hardly knew what to say, what he even really _felt_. He clutched the reins, the bottle, and clutched at words that would make the day stay right, but they continued to elude him. He was the quietest he’d been the whole ride.
But he had stories. The guards were full of them, and whenever someone broke out beer and bottles of wine, the quarters themselves became the scene of their ridiculous shenanigans. No worry for propriety, for tact, for offense, and no officers, either, once they’d retired to their beds or offices. It would scandalize their lady mother and sisters to know what happened there, what Aegaryn heard, what Aegaryn said, but Aegaryn found no complaints. In fact, compared to elsewhere in the Hold, he quite liked it. He couldn't get enough. He began recounting the impromptu party some of the guys had thrown a few nights ago, how they had waited until the shift changeover was done and the overhead was out, busting out cards for poker, plenty of beer, even someone's decent skills on a gitar and a surprisingly good singing voice when the alcohol kicked in, and Aegaryn turned to Dren with a huge shit-eating grin -- that _look_ and the story behind it something their mother would lose sleep over.
“So, one of the guys goes off on their own.”
“Which one?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“It doesn’t. Anyway, turns out-- he snuck this girl in, and they’re going at it in the supply room. They’re not quiet. Knocking all kinds of shit off the shelves. Moridar catches them right in the middle of it. He forces ‘em to come out, tripping over everything, but their clothes are under all the mess, and they’re just standing there, and--” Aegaryn snorted, slowing his runner to a stop.
“And?”
“Dren, he’s got his hand over his dick, and she’s just got a boot. And Petraf shows up.” His green eyes flashed. “He goes, ‘are you serious?’ Buddy-with-his-dick-out just says, ‘Evening sir’. And Petraf says, ‘Cold in there, huh?’ and-- and he just lets the girl _go_.”
“You’re joking.”
“I swear, the guy is there with his dick and the boot, Dren.”
Drenorik snorted a laugh. “There’s no way that happened. Petraf wouldn’t say that.”
“Shit you not.” Aegaryn grinned. “More or less.”
"No point in asking who, I suppose.” Drenorik chuckled somewhat disbelievingly. “That poor dumb girl’s probably been shipped off to the Weyr by now, anyway…” though there was a quiet note of pity there, maybe, for the circumstances as he shook his head.
The road grew dusty. The encroaching weeds along the margins got bolder, bigger, with no trees to tower over them and syphon off most of the sunlight. Out here they could talk a little more freely. Just brothers, who arguably got on with each other better than they did with either of their elder two. Just the rhythmic sway of runnerbeasts, their solid warmth beneath them. But their time was short, and by the angle of the sun, dinner preparations were underway somewhere behind them, and all Aegaryn felt was a weirdness trying to bleed in. Disconcerting. It seemed so far away, the Weyr. Though he knew if they kept to the narrow path, it would eventually merge back with the main road, take them further on for a few more hours -- or was it days? " and then straight into Dragonsfall. Either way, same place.
Now, as he looked over the dry, cracked fields, empty of hands to work the soil into something good, it was hard to know when they would be down this way again. The fields were as they always were. The openness was unmatched: the lack of prying eyes and straining ears. A blessing, out here. Time still couldn’t penetrate the bubble of quiet devastation left by the plague.
Aegaryn tried to picture coming here alone and couldn’t.
He pictured Drenorik and his infectious smile, trying to place him astride a vast shapeless beast of no particular color or form, just high and bright, a lean slant on its neck, but it felt awkward and foreign and, frankly, wrong. Too forced. At odds with the moment and with his memories. Far away from now-- though perhaps that was just the limitations of his own imagination. His own will, what he wanted. As if his desire for a different decision were something that could even be altered in a dragon’s mind, or his brother’s. He didn’t think it could be. He didn’t think it should be, either, deep down.
He swallowed the lump in his throat, casting a speculative glance over his shoulder. Drenorik was looking down, holding the reins in his less dominant hand. Thoughtful. As if testing the feel of something new, visible only to his eyes.
“Hey,” Aegaryn said, slowing Amak. “So… did you want to get Searched?” He tried not to sound too obvious when Drenorik’s gaze met his. “Or did it just happen?”
“I guess I did. I mean, who doesn’t?” Drenorik shrugged, and he brightened with the sheer unfettered surprise of the day. “It’s like you being in the guard: you just kind of ended up there, and it seems to be working out.” He rolled his eyes. “Mostly.”
“Yeah, but you've gotta _want_ to be a dragonrider, don’t you?” A shudder ripped through Aegaryn’s shoulders, brief, automatic, at his next thought. “Remember Sybana’s uncle?”
A long look passed between them.
Drenorik's mouth opened and then shut, and he went silent. “Yeah,” he said, finally.
As they rode on, squinting out over the flat fields for nothing in particular, something felt off. The weather was fairer than the days before, deeply quiet and cool, but warm by Opal Cove’s standards. Almost balmy, with moisture clinging low in the air. The sounds of the sea crashed closer as they wound their way down the path. They stopped to shed their jackets, draping them over the pommels, while their runners chased small shoots of spring grass. The bottle jumped back and forth between them a few more times, the swishing inside growing fainter. It was a fine day, the sun warming their backs as they stretched, almost enough to draw sweat.
Aegaryn’s eyes were fixed on the thin band of sea between the plateau of cliffs and the horizon. There was a strangeness settling between them the further they rode. "Well…” he was still searching for some way to break it. To offer something he could actually take with him. “If anyone can do it, it’s you.”
An exaggerated look of ‘aww’ lit Drenorik’s face. He touched his chest, too, jokingly, but there was sincerity there, too, like there always was. “Hey, I’m willing to find out.”
Then, Aegaryn gave him a slow sidelong look. “And… Sybana?” And the softness in his tone seemed to put a crater in Drenorik’s excitement.
It was the first time his brother’s expression truly slipped. “I… That…” Drenorik’s eyes shut, perhaps at the thought of her. His face was changed when they opened again -- not quite resignation, not quite regret, not something he showed often, but the enthusiasm had muted itself like a swift punch. He sat a little straighter. “Yeah, it’s too bad… I’m going to miss her.”
Aegaryn studied the storm of emotions. Their slow, uneven ebb. His brows knit. “You told her yet?”
“Not yet,” Drenorik admitted stiffly, “but she'll have heard by now. You did.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t had a chance.” Drenorik answered. Aegaryn wondered, then, if Dren hadn’t let himself think of that part too much. “I will, though. Soon as we’re back.”
Aegaryn could imagine Sybana's surprise when she first caught the news well enough. The shock and joy of it had moved through him before the low-grade tendrils of panic could crystallize, and he hadn't wanted them to. They were selfish, and they didn’t belong, and they pulled at him now, harder than ever. He sighed and gripped the reins harder.
Curving toward the sea, the road dry and rocky in places where the wind had torn away its softer top layer, he had to raise his voice more over the crash of the waves just below.
“No second thoughts or anything?”
Drenorik tilted his head at him curiously. “Or anything?”
“Yeah, I--" Aegaryn looked out toward the water. “You just seem sure of it. That’s all.”
“I am.” Drenorik said, then a shade softer, “Doesn’t mean it's simple.”
But then, there was a bizarre shift in the air, a sense of something gathering. Something felt rather than seen or heard. Instinctively they stopped.
Last updated on the June 4th 2026