His daughters had given him new life.
New life, new hope, and he loved them with all the life that was left to his ailing body. He stopped hunting lately, letting his children bring whatever they might find - always under some guise of letting them learn… but he thought perhaps that Natu might have known. He thought perhaps she had found him out back when he did not fight the healer who threw his command of his own den to the metaphorical wolves and tended his mate. It would not have surprised him, though he did know he kept his state in the dark in regards to his three littlest daughters -- and most especially from his, the last dragonlet he would ever give birth to.

She was not the usual dragon of his dragon’s bloodline, but then - what about Moladion ever left things of that kind untouched. In Moladion, Angels wore the hides and banner colors of Demons. No, Tiamat was not the usurping black of her ancestors -- but there it was. Her ancestors still sought the color of her eyes for their own and left them impenetrably white. And what of his other daughters?

It is not snowing, but Medea yet looks like someone had thrown a ball of snow across the side of her neck. She is beautiful, he thinks, in her quiet way. She is ever so like he was in his youth. Tempered, calm, collected within herself. She sung him songs, a beautiful voice that could not be competed with in all his memory.

Then, of course, there is Feather. Named after an aunt of hers, by the gracious delight of his daughter Samia who did not even know better, she was the largest of the three by far. Large, but shaped far more leanly than originally anticipated at her birth. She is not going to be as tall as he, but she will become quite his weight in power, he thinks. She is much like Samia, the one who named her, in temperament. Kind, excitable, loving, gentle of heart. Or at least that is the Samia he chooses to see in spite or despite her teacher.

They have come to see their Uncle Seamus and their brother Alexander in Taviora and have spent a beautiful week in the falling leaves and needles of autumn. A fulfilling journey, a wonderful vacation, and still he feels the toll of years and wars and battles in his bones. He romps while he can with them, bowing in play and inciting his mate to play along with them. For the afternoon of the full moon, they rest. There would be a red one, he can feel, and there is a blessing in his heart for the happenstance of being housed in a clearing amidst the tightly woven forest of Taviora, the new Scotavia.

Then night falls and while the daughters of his last legacy sleep beside their much-grown elder brother in his den with his brothers-at-arms, he prods Natu and gives her a wistful look of love, adoration, and encouragement. It is a sad but peaceful invitation - a knowing glance that begs her to spend this final night of freedom amongst the softly falling flurries before the first snow of the season truly began.

And then he is off. Whatever years was left in him was spent in dancing leaps and wild lolling tongues, eyes brightened with the expenditure of all that was left of him in a blaze of true merriment and contentment that his time was come. He races beneath the moon, dancing about his mate in the youthful vigor that she might have known of him in years far past and before all the rejection of their love that had come after.

Then, when his heart and spirit had been burned to embers, he lays in the bed of needles over where he only guesses is where he might have once been born to Bahamut and Jaye, and howls a song of thanksgiving and love to his Mother Moon. A song of a boy who was born in this place before it was reshaped into a new body, a song of a brother in a rainbow of brothers-at-arms, a song of venturing to a new land and coming to love it there, a song of victory over mighty beasts and enemies, a song of coming home and refinding a love, a song of taking that love to see where it was that he had cut his teeth in war, a song of losing that love to time and returning, a song of a son who defied and rejected him, a song of finding that son again and seeing he was great in his own way, a song of children come from the true light of his life, a song of strife and struggles and lost brothers, a song of golden years spent with his own Moon by the sea… and, when she lays beside him, he speaks only a little in a whispered and eerie voice that was reminiscent of foggy nights turning to foggy mornings.

His pale green eyes, growing dimmer, but no less loving, turn to her. "We are the Moon and her Darkness, you and I." And then his neck is placed over hers and he lets himself drift - knowing she too is following him and he will not be alone again. He drifts and the last words he speaks are that of his brothers who await him -- and the brother he at last leaves behind.

The moon, after the clouds of the first snow coating them in a funeral shroud have passed, is a bloody one - The Mother Moon weeping for her fallen child.