Chapter Eight

Elio StarScale

1 Year, 3 Months, 2 Weeks, and 4 Days Later

The orange star shaped scale over my heart vibrated jolting me awake.

"Huh?" my elder brother, Marsin, grunted.

I pushed myself upright. He was still at the computer command station watching for the ship that might never appear on the radar. I'd done everything within my power to bring to life the plan laid out in the Other World. Now we could only wait. Fred Moonscale had received at least one of the intended scrolls. At first, the magic pinged often as the map was projected again and again, but now more than a year had passed without any contact from the scrolls. Maybe he wasn't coming. Maybe I'd let everyone down. If I did, my uncle would never let me live it down.

Uncle Hush was the leader of our world and some considered him the leader of all three Starscale planets. Though, his brothers, who ruled their own worlds, disagreed with that. Marsin and I were pretty sure our uncle only let us try because of his soft spot for our mother. That and he didn't believe we could pull off the magic necessary to contact what all the older dragons called the old world. We had more than five hundred times over. Uncle Hush was flabbergasted that even one scroll made its way there. I'd never admit it, but I was too. How did one even go about contacting a man he met briefly during what the other party probably considered a fever dream, if he remembered it at all. Marsin and I slept for weeks after porting those scrolls through space to coordinates only remembered in the oldest of the paper books. It took a lot out of us, but Marsin was determined to help me on my mission. Mostly, because no one in our history had ever done such a thing. Also, no one ever made soul contract with a dead person and a living one at the same time while being dead. That's when I carved out the future I wanted for this life. My star scale sat on the shelf and I was gone. Everyone who knew the person I was before thought I was gone for good, because I took so long to come back. But who wanted to be a beta over and over? Who wanted to live without finding someone to love forever? Not me, apparently, but somehow in the Other World, this last time I found who and what I was looking for. I don't remember it clearly, but I have proof. Lots and lots of proof. If there's one thing the Starscales are good at, it's keeping records for proof later on.

The radar squealed and I sprinted across the room to look over Marsin's shoulder. His messy, shoulder length hair was in my way, so I smoothed it down as my eyes settled on the vessel beeping across our radar.

"They're flying right over us!" Marsin grunted. "Fucking idiots! We're right here! Are you blind?"

"Maybe they're looking for a place to land!"

My heart leapt into my throat and sank back down as my dragon stood up inside me. I shifted in my seat as he jiggled me around, making the star-shaped scale on my chest vibrate again. The orange oaf was the one who remembered everything. Dragons were good like that. Hopefully, if I lived long enough this time some of his memory keeping abilities might rub off on me.

"They're circling back around!" I pointed at the screen.

"Thanks, Captain Right in Front of Our Noses," Marsin grunted.

"Turn on the lighthouse!" I said, fighting off the urge to whack him on the back of the head like we might've done as kids. He was only older than me by about three minutes and that was only because he had huge feet that he bonked through his eggshell with.

"I'm doing it!" he grunted at me.

The ship circled a few more times, sinking lower with each oval, egg shape it drew around the landing field. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. My star scale was pounding now. Marsin glanced at me, his eyes locked to the tell-tale sign that our mission was successful. I touched my shoulder and winced. The claiming gland there was sore now and starting to fill up. The one of the other side was flat and dormant. They weren't back together yet. My dragon roared inside my chest, missing his old Other World lover, but this wasn't the time to think of that. While Marsin informed the landing field crew of the incoming ship, I scurried into the bathroom and scrubbed my face clean. I hadn't shaved in days, leaving my beard scruffy, but there was no time to fix that now. I stripped out of my sweatpants and into a pair of denim pants with plenty of pockets. I considered grabbing a shirt, but there wasn't a fabric in our galaxy that would hide the pulsating scale sitting over my heart. My dragon roared again, threatening to force his way out of me, if I didn't get a move on. Only once he stepped off that ship, my mission really started. If he didn't remember what happened, he might not believe a word that came out of my mouth. He was a Moonscale, not a Starscale. They didn't keep records the special way we did. Either way, putting it off wouldn't help any of us.