Page 20 of Waking Her Dragon

He didn't search for complex tactical data or the locations of the Guard. He reached for her. He forced his awareness into the fog, desperate to grasp the name his soul kept repeating.

Sydney.

The second his mind brushed against the syllable, the darkness fractured. A violent, blinding cascade of images flooded his consciousness.

A flash of golden-blond curls catching the sun.

He reached for it, but it slipped through his mental fingers like sand. They were gone.

A pair of bright blue eyes, wide with a fierce, untamed intelligence.

He tried to lock onto them, to anchor them to his soul. They vanished.

The phantom echo of a melodic, breathless laugh.

It rang in his ears for a millisecond before evaporating into static. Zapped from existence in a single beat of his heart.

And then, the most absurdly mundane detail flashed through the Void– a pair of scuffed, light blue Converse sneakers standing on a concrete floor. It was so ordinary, so intensely real, that it made his throat tighten with a sudden, suffocating grief.

Before he could even register the memory, a massive wall of tectonic Dragon Magic slammed shut, incinerating the images and throwing him back into total amnesia. The vault was ruthlessly locked once more.

“STOP TAKING HER AWAY FROM ME!” Garrett screamed into the internal dark, his telepathic voice cracking with a raw, agonizing desperation that mirrored the physical torture of his body.

“I am not taking her away,” Aodhan’s voice resonated back, the Dragon King’s tone heavy, exhausted, and laced with a profound, solemn truth. “I am keeping him from finding her.”

The words echoed through the empty chambers of Garrett’s looted mind, and the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place. The brutal reality of what the Dragon King with whom he shared his soul had been doing finally washed over him. Han wasn't hoarding the memories out of cruelty. He was playing a lethal game of hide-and-seek with a Demon Lord. Every time Garrett pulled an image of Sydney to the surface, he was painting a glowing target on her back for Leviathan to trace.

Garrett sank back into the internal darkness, the phantom images of blond curls and blue sneakers completely erased, leaving him entirely hollow.

But this time, the fury didn't return.

He looked at the towering, impenetrable vault Aodhan had constructed inside their shared soul. He felt the crushing weight of the amnesia he had been fighting so bitterly.

“Keep it locked,” Garrett commanded, his mental voice turning to liquid steel.

The decision was absolute. Before, Han had been forcing the blindness upon him, dragging him kicking and screaming into the darkness to save his life. But now, the choice belonged to the Guardsman. Garrett looked directly into the face of his own erasing history and willingly surrendered it. He would live as a ghost. He would let his mind remain a hollow shell and actively participate in the destruction of his own happiness.

He would consciously sacrifice the memory of Sydney, simply to ensure that Sydney stayed alive.

Violent, physical tremors shook the internal chamber. The quiet shattered. The silver rod was ripped from his flesh and bone.

Garrett’s eyes snapped open a split second before he landed on the floor with a vicious, bone-shattering thud. The stone floor beneath his cheek lurched. The prison was changing… morphing… breathing?

The slow, heavy churning of the primordial waters beyond the walls suddenly spiked, accelerating into a fierce, rhythmic thumping that vibrated right through Garrett’s bones. To his left, the ancient, serpent-like sigil of the leviathan began to pulse, a sickly, iridescent black light emanating from the center. With every heartbeat of the symbol, a new fracture spiderwebbed across the weeping stone walls, accompanied by the sharp, terrifying sound of primordial rock groaning under immense load.

Then came the pull.

It wasn't a physical hand gripping his torn and tattered clothes. It was a terrifying, magnetic drag on his very soul. Garrett gasped, feeling his essence being stretched outward, pulled toward the weeping black walls as if something on the other side were trying to siphon his life force straight out of his body.

Deep within his mind, Han flared to life, his timeless presence instantly transforming from solemn sorrow into pure, unadulterated alarm. The Dragon King slammed his pure White Magic against the internal walls of their consciousness, fighting the invisible tide.

Garrett didn't understand the mechanics of cosmic geometry. He didn't know the word ‘anchor’. But as he lay unmoving on the cold, stone floor, he could feel the terrifying reality of how they were being used.

Watching the patterns of the chamber, his tactical mind mapped the ragged and raw energy shifts. Every time his breathing turned shallow, and his heart rate slowed toward cessation, the invisible pressure beyond the walls pushed harder. The stone cracked wider. But the moment his Dragon Magic flared up to keep him breathing, the pressure retreated. The shadows locked back down into place.

The contradiction hit him with a jarring clarity.

Leviathan wasn't merely keeping him alive as a trophy. His continued existence– the raw, vibrating force of a Dragon King tethered to a more-than-mortal vessel– was actively containing something vast and terrible on the other side of that black stone.