[Dragon]

[11:13] -- corpseAgaric [CA] began pestering renegadeDragon [RD] at 23:13 –

[11:14] -- corpseAgaric [CA] Isaiah sat by a hollowed out tree near the river, piles of strange herbs and fungi around him –

[11:18] RD: She approached as dusk moved into night, sifting through overgrown sagging greenery to find the medic already there. Beyond them, the sound of rushing water, unbalanced to her single ear. Regarded him coolly, as though patiently awaiting a cue he'd missed.

[11:27] CA: At the sound, he turned his single eye and enormous ears to the source. She was a colossus, comparatively, with green eye as dead as his gold was bright. "Infection," he said, guarded, awkward. "We have to clean it. If we don't, it will poison your blood." Little did he know how poisoned this stranger already was, how he might save her body, but somehow it was already a corpse for the soul it failed to house.

[11:31] RD: If the strange boy was stricken by the size of her now, starved and mutilated and weatherworn as she was, perhaps he'd never even have approached her only a year ago. She'd been monstrous, unstoppable... healthy, in a manner of speaking. No matter their similarities however, Isaiah was still far more whole than she.
[11:33] -- renegadeDragon [RD] spoke, in the first instance any of these brutish foreigners would hear her voice. “It subsided, for a time." A short pause. "What can you do.”

[11:41] CA: He cautiously motioned her closer. There were medicines for infection, but there was no substitute for cleaning the rotten skin. "You have to wash your face in the river, and then there are salves for the wound." He was very unsure of himself, directing this... this creature. She might have reminded him of the violet and black beast that had once lurked, putrid, in the jungle's core. But no - this one was much more dangerous. She was much more self-aware. "You have to scrub it clean. It might bleed again."

[11:52] -- renegadeDragon [RD] observed him for a loaded moment. It was a searching look, as though she could pry something incorporeal out of him -- some proof of competency in his work? She must have found whatever it was she sought, for she heeded his orders without another word, descending to her underside and crawling a pace or two forward until she was half submerged in the river. A brief hint of cervical spine was visible as she inclined her head, pushing it here and there, scouring it with nails, removing what debris and oozing scabs she could.
[11:54] RD: The numbing cold of the water was not enough to counter the incredible pain of this, though when she withdrew from it at last to stare at Isaiah again, it was with diluted blood trickling down her face... but no apparent agony. If there had been a reflexive snarl or hiss of breath, the river had swallowed it up.

 [12:08] CA: The bedraggled boy was almost entranced by this creature, so hideous and scarred, carrying the blackness of her soul around her as though it were a cape made of someone else's skin. Perhaps he even related with her, related with being hideous, related with staring death in the face but somehow refusing to die. She cleaned her face and it oozed first its black blood and then its red, a first step fixing this monster so that it could be released upon the world again. Isaiah, of course, would not understand the consequences of his generosity.
[12:08] CA: She looked at him with an eye like that of a snake, somehow void and keen at once. The effects of her scrubbing, clearing the foulness away, the chunks of dirt and meat removed from the scab so it could heal fresh.
[12:08] CA: "Now this." He said, and now more than ever he was on edge. He would gesture to a broad leaf covered in a thin, sappy paste. If she allowed, and lowered her head to his reach in some way, he used the leaf to apply the substance on the newly opened wound. For a moment, it would likely sting ferociously, but then it would become numbing. "Keep the area clean," he'd add, after having stepped away as soon as he applied the paste, knowing that it would hurt.

[12:26] RD: Perhaps she already knew that he knew. About why she'd come here, that is. Had seen it in his grim face as they'd made short work of the young man Azuhel had brought home, some knowing that had been absent from the faces of said southern belle, from the shaggy blue girl, the fat ex-prince, the lean father and daughter. They had talked about their own business amongst themselves, things that did not concern her, but nevertheless were trapped in her immediate memory like a flytrap snares an insect.
[12:30] -- renegadeDragon [RD] considered, in her savvy way, what this could mean, as she lowered her head for him, water and blood drizzling from her chin, her face momentarily close to his. --
[12:32] RD: "You haven't named your payment." Not that she felt obligated to such things. Yet why use up precious resources without it, unless Isaiah did this altruistically... or to poison this trespasser? "Surely you don't do me this kindness for free."

 [12:58] CA: Isaiah knew she was not from Alteron, he had known from the moment he had seen and smelled her, the lack of recognition on the other faces, the scent of sunlight still clung to her coat, the smell of grasses and dust, and rolling in the ferns and fetid soil of Alteron could not mask her origins from him. Isaiah knew the flora of Alteron better than the leaders knew even the fauna. Neither new master nor former slave had dared to question Dragon's presence here.
[12:58] CA: She lowered her disgusting, bleeding face to his, and he could smell the rankness of her breath, mixed with the freshness of the cold water and the warmth of her blood. She wanted to know what he demanded as payment. He had not considered bargaining in this, his actions motivated not by greed nor generosity so much as curiosity. Coming to the beast like an ugly kobold come to admire the larger and more fearsome.
[12:58] CA: "My wounds looked like yours once," he said, the gaping socket shadowed in the darkness. "This work is interesting." Save whatever of the monsters face he could. Maybe that was vanity. Or maybe that was shame. Maybe it was that he didn't want the world to contain any mirrors through which he could see himself. Had he claimed that the gesture was out of the goodness of his heart, Dragon might have thought him a fool, or she might not have believed him, but it didn't matter. This wasn't out of the goodness of his heart. It was something out of his bad memories.
[12:58] CA: "If you want to pay me back." He said nonchalantly. "When you leave," And they both knew she would "If you ever see a black wolf named Talon, give him... my regards." He carefully removed the leaf now that its sticky contents were congealing to the wound. Sticking a paw into a pile of dark powder, he then gently touched it to her face - the powder stuck. It would dry the wound and keep it from sticking to anything else it shouldn't. As for his regards, Dragon could read his face for herself and decide what message she might want to convey to Talon should they ever meet. Isaiah's face was had never been a particularly cheerful one.
[12:58] CA: "You're done." He said coolly, observing his work. "For the pain, that." He gestured to several dried plants that would intoxicate her and ease her pain for tonight. Tomorrow she could take the rest, the more mild anesthetics.

 [01:08] RD: Not altruism, not treachery; this glum knobby boy did this for other, murkier reasons. Some desire to by mending another animal who resembled him so in his wreckage make this world that much less ugly, even as he reduced her to a practice cadaver in his mind, one dead and disfigured by a rare and terrible disease. Such a nightmare end for the patient; such a delight for its doctor.
[01:10] RD: The concoction on her torn, miserable, pulsating face tingled and faintly burned. Incuriously she turned back to the river, peering with her remaining eye upon the surface. Stared into her reflection for a number of heartbeats. She made no remark upon the subject of payment, though these details (blackwolftalonregardslookonhisfaceunkind) too were retained. Had this other wolf taken Isaiah's eye? Would she keep this promise, if not only just to pass her own empty life by taking it where she still could?
[01:18] -- renegadeDragon [RD] retreated from the river once more, lying down with head rested upon paws in his general vicinity. Sniffed the dried plants a bit before consuming them unceremoniously. Watched the boy still, gaze bright but unfathomably tired. --
[01:20] RD: "I wonder," said she, "what sort of kingdom allows one of their most valuable to suffer as you have." And if he hadn't known, he surely did now. "They can always find more soldiers. More kings."

 [01:51] CA: Isaiah didn't much care if Dragon would keep her promise. He could have asked her to find and kill Hartigan instead, the one who had actually taken his eye, but no - that was Isaiah's battle alone. He could have asked her to keep an eye out instead for one of his lost loved ones, his missing sister, Epee's grave. But no, he would not trust this stranger with those he held dear. So in the end, it was only the one he did not truly care about that he would leave with this stranger. Wherever the dark wolf was, Isaiah would feel neither pride nor sympathy at any fate that might have befallen him.
[01:52] CA: The monstrous wolf laid herself down after eating his herbs, and stared at him from her paws. Her lids drooped almost imperceptibly, but her green eye was still bright and unnerving. Why was it that green eyes in particular were always so eerie? Isaiah had once matched amber to green before his disfigurement.
[01:52] CA: "I wonder," her voice croaked, dragging Isaiah from his memories, "what sort of kingdom allows one of their most valuable to suffer as you have. They can always find more soldiers. More kings." This musing bordered on philosophical, and Isaiah took a step closer and then sat, pausing for a moment to wipe his bloody, sticky paw upon the greenery below him. He had certainly never been compared to anything valuable except by naive children and a biased and blatantly lying mother. He was disinclined to change his self-worth based on the cryptic musings of a drugged stranger. But the sentiment, sadly, was one of the nicer ones he had received in his pathetic life.
[01:53] CA: "When your soldiers are replaceable, why bother fixing them?" He answered simply though hypothetically and frankly it came out bitter. Why should a medic receive fewer accolades than the soldiers they heal? It was a fair question, but in reality, no soldier, healer or king had ever avoided suffering here. They suffered in their separate ways, but they all suffered. Of course, the reason for fixing them had always been the fixing itself. Isaiah had always hated soldiers and kings, but he'd healed a great many not for the love of the patient, but for the love of their wounds. "This kingdom is built on suffering." He added. "There is really no reason for you to stay, once you heal. It can't offer you anything."

 [11:49] RD: "The capability alone sets you apart. I have met many destroyers, all of them alike. I've never wondered what goes into their making. Menders, however..."
 [12:00] -- renegadeDragon [RD] trailed off, swinging her head heavily from her paws until it rested instead on the loamy earth. The side of her head that still retained an eye pressed down, her muzzle making slow, odd, metronomic movements that swathed a shallow furrow into the dirt. There were tiny supernovas bursting somewhere around an optic nerve and she willingly shut herself off to them, seeing nothing now, turning Isaiah into voice alone. The image of her then, a collapsed living body attached to the slimy, mangled part of her face left visible, was deeply unsettling.
[12:04] RD: "Then I won't." Not for long, anyway. And then, a moment later -- "Tell me your name."

[09:57] CA: Menders weren't so much different from destroyers. No wolf could ever be like a plant, truly providing and existing without feeding on others. Healers were more like mushrooms - they could give you medicine, or they could poison you, but just like wolves they had to eat and drain and destroy to thrive. Isaiah may have been a healer, and he may even have been relatable and sometimes even heroic, but it did not make him good or special. So very few people were special.
[09:57] CA: "Think of menders as really shitty destroyers, and it makes more sense." He said, his voice a little self-deprecating. She'd lain her head down at her feet, closed her eye. The drugs were likely taking effect. He could have left now, but he felt as though he should stay, watch over the beast he had sung to sleep with his doctoring. She was so ugly, even now as she approached something peaceful. In fact, her peace was almost more unsettling than her pain. She accepted his advice, promising to leave the borders soon and return to the world beyond Alteron.
[09:57] CA: She asked for his name. "Isaiah." He answered truthfully, for what reason did he have to lie? "And yours? If you care to give it." He felt pretty noncommittal about the whole thing. Her face was more interesting than her name could be.

[10:16] RD: And yet she considered him neither good nor heroic, did she? Those were only words, flighty concepts a great many creatures of the wild adopted like a too-old child clutches a stained, tattered blanket. Special meant only that here was something she might deign to observe and take apart, nothing more. Destroyers had always claimed their uses, but menders – those who built and created and healed – had ever been the ones to challenge her, complete her in a most perverse way.
[10:18] RD: “Isaiah,” she echoed hoarsely, without moving her head, paralyzed or apathetic to the tidal waves of boiling black frothing up somewhere in her skull, manifestation of a waking dream. “Come here, Isaiah. You don’t want my name. You want to know what made me like this.”

[10:28] CA: Destroyer, healer, in the end it never really mattered much, there was too much gray in between those poles, and Isaiah had made his nest in the middle. There was something good in him, something that made him want to defend Ryuko, something that had made him love his sister and laugh with Epee. But there was something evil, too, the boy had bitten holes in rats just to see if he could heal their fatal wounds, he'd have gladly poisoned Blade had the prince been foolish enough to accept an offer of food or drink, and he'd have set the whole of Alteron on fire if it were some ritual to bring back those he loved or destroy those he hated. Isaiah lived in the chiaroscuro of Alteron, where light was only cast down in stray pieces through the dark canopy. It was not surprising that he could find no purity here.
[10:28] CA: She repeated his name with a rasping tongue. She told him to come here, and he did, bolder now that they'd shared some piece of their stories, and now that she was all but immobile with the relief only narcotics could offer. Yes, he did want to know what made her like this. He wanted to know who had done this to her, because he knew all too well who had done it to him. "Yes." He answered simply, ugly, overlarge ears pricked forward, curious and curiouser, willing to go down this rabbit hole at least a little ways, to find out who had dug it.

[10:49] RD: Abruptly she did move then, with a fluid suddenness, the end of her muzzle (and the teeth inside, oh the faithless killing teeth) close enough all at once that he might feel the cold, ragged rush of breath from either nostril rustling the glum hairs on an available body part. Mad little semicircles of starlight wavered in the blank lime eye.
[10:50] RD: “So many wolves lose perspective. They believe that they are in control of situations where they are not. I thought the same, perhaps…” She watched, unconcerned and unfazed, as the outline of him – this poor dear martyr of a boy, this meager talented runt – began to thread and meld into the canopy above his head. “It's an unforgivable mistake. I should not be here with you.”

[11:24] CA: He had been foolish to assume he was safe, he of all people should know that no one is ever safe, the vicissitudes of this ugly world would stir and swallow each and every one of them like so many tiny shreds of meat in a thin soup. Her muzzle snapped upwards until he could feel her breath on his own crooked muzzle, the chill humidity in the air causing the vapor in her breath to appear as smoke.
[11:24] CA: He did not know her name, so he could not know how accurate it was. They were mirror images, these two wolves who seemed to understand so many things and yet both failed in so many others. Eyeless sockets, hearts either absent entirely or sickly and strained. He was not afraid of her, even if she had bitten him, she would be so slowed by Isaiah's cocktail that she'd have never managed to catch him once he began to run.
“So many wolves lose perspective. They believe that they are in control of situations where they are not. I thought the same, perhaps…” Her gaze swam in its own delirium. Isaiah knew the feeling. Painkillers were his most familiar self-prescription. “It's an unforgivable mistake. I should not be here with you.”
[11:24] CA: "You probably would have died." He said calmly. "It would have taken a while. But infection will catch up to you." He leaned back away from her and sat just out of striking range. "This way you can repay whoever took this from you." He knew he wanted to return Hartigan's favor, he imagined she must feel the same. He couldn't know that it had been Dragon who had done the lion's share of the taking. "I can leave, if you want." He flicked an ear calmly. "Or if you want, I'll stay and stand guard." Either way, in the morning she'd feel better.

[12:02] RD: “Yes,” deigned she to admit, as if this was something she did not already know, “I suppose you are correct.”
[12:02] RD: Even death, in all its finality and cold fairness, lacked the power to frighten her. It did not mean to her what it meant to others of her kind. But there was discontent nonetheless at the idea of this slow whittling decay, this quiet purposeless fading out, this inexorable /succumbing/. Pain was a monster, infection its fangs, and if there was any reason she was still alive, perhaps it was only to avoid it swallowing her whole, leaving her without resistance to be digested.
[12:02] RD: She’d been denied so much – not that anyone should ever feel sympathy for that, given how atrocious her former desires. She would not be denied dying on her own terms, headed quickly to nowhere at all with no business left unfinished… and no absence of a souvenir in the slackening jaws to take with. A pretty golden one, if she were truly blessed. It was a vow made in cruel spite and solemn dignity intertwined.
[12:02] RD: “Stay, my generous little friend. Don’t back away – I would not hurt you.” Nor could she, suspected Dragon. “I want to know if it was much the same, when you too were robbed.”

[Dragon]

[11:51] CA: “Yes, I suppose you are correct.” The monster admitted, even monsters could be slain by the smallest cut should infection taint them. Dead monsters did not kill pretty golden knights - for Dragon, there was still work to do. Dragon's crimes were so unspeakably loathsome that she had earned herself a death of justice, not of slow decay. Her death would be by the sword, not the microbe. Her death deserved to be witnessed. She owed the world that much. It would not be anonymous.

[11:51] CA: Isaiah did not know of Dragon's fateful grudge against a kingdom of lilac trees and silver princes, the lust for a golden queen's dying gasps. A place like Inaria was beyond the boy's imagination. Much as he had not understood Azuhel's fire, bred from Oukoku's fanaticism, he would never fathom a place where the good and the meek triumphed over monsters. In Alteron he had only known damp and cold and squalor, darkness and cruelty, fighting for scraps, and so he presumed this was the modus operandi of the entire world beyond, making Dragon not a cruel kingslayer, but just another wolf with hackles raised, status quo maintained. An audience of the genre savvy might recognize Dragon's tale with Inaria as one of the oldest tropes, but Isaiah had never heard a fairy tale.

[11:51] CA: “Stay, my generous little friend. Don’t back away – I would not hurt you.” The still unnamed creature said hoarsely. “I want to know if it was much the same, when you too were robbed.” So he stayed.

[11:51] CA: Isaiah's singular eye fell to his feet thoughtfully for a moment, recalling the scene in vivid detail, remembering the pain. "I never made the mistake of feeling in control." He answered after a pause. "I've never been in control." No - it had been precisely the opposite. "He never said why he did it." Isaiah said, hesitantly. This was the first time he had talked about the incident, really talked about it. Jette had wanted to join in some revenge violence, but that was not the same as understanding Isaiah's pain. "I suppose it was because I had the audacity of surviving here, in this place" He said quietly. "When I wasn't supposed to have been able to."

[11:51] CA: The mauling had been no fault of his own, he had been born into this weak body, his low station, his pitiful family. He had been given no power to defend himself, not through bloodlines or physical strength, through political savvy or connections. His staying alive had been a force of will, like an ugly weed through a sidewalk crack, just asking to be cut. "Maybe that doesn't make sense." He said. "Since you aren't of this place. Sometimes I think it was like a tax. Something the forest took from me in exchange." Like rent for the space he took up with his brokenness. "I was probably supposed to die before I was born." He said, his pitiful bony face only reinforcing the sad idea. "I should probably not be here with you, either, but here we both are." Both sans an eye, like a price they had to pay to the universe for being born so malformed.

[11:51] CA: Just think of it as paying the ferryman half in advance.

[12:30] RD: She was a patient, careful, attentive listener when she cared to be. When she was capable of committing to others that sort of interest. His strange foul herbs were roiling some stagnant black pool in the center of her skull -- which, should there be any of dear sweet hobbled Elizabeth's version of justice on the horizon, would someday be torn from her shoulders without mercy -- and stirring a frothy vile sediment long settled at the untouched forgotten bottom of that dangerous wellspring up to the surface like chum. Behind the glassy opaque stare was something rotten and cadaverous; what, oh what, was the difference between medicine and poison?

[12:30] RD: Confess, Isaiah. Sing to this damning altar. It will never share your pain, it will never mourn for you, because it can't, because we're all spun with certain natures and dropped without say into certain roles. But it will understand. Though it was fashioned of beauty and nobility, a poisonous, corrupted monkshood amidst the jacaranda garden where you are as ugly and base as the soil you rose up from... it will take you with it when it begins to recover and think about leaving this suffering city.

[12:30] RD: "Pitiable boy," she lamented as he concluded his brutish little tale. It would have been mocking in another's mouth. It would have been sympathetic, in yet another, or said with syrupy condescension, worst of all. Here it was none of those things, not really.

[12:30] RD: "The black wolf -- your Talon." A fishhook as much as it was a hypothesis, grasping for more. "It was him who robbed you."

[1:15] CA: She listened quietly, the drugs and the pain perhaps addling that curiously misfiring gray matter, or perhaps not, for her cold stare revealed nothing to the boy. It didn't matter, either way. It was what it was, and Isaiah had said his piece. The details didn't matter, what would Hartigan's name add to this happy little story, there was nothing Isaiah could say that would explain to anyone what the flash of white had looked like as it came upon him like a ghost and a thunderstorm. Nothing to describe how Hartigan's bloodied ear had tasted. What it felt like when the sclera dripped down his cheek in place of tears, the changling screeching in unholy pain.

[1:15] CA: Isaiah was growing weary of the path this conversation was taking.

[1:15] CA: "Pitiable boy," Was Dragon's summary of his tale, and Isaiah had no further comment but to stare at her thoughtfully. He would not have been offended by her condescension or moved by her sympathy, because regardless of his story, here she was with the same wound, only fresher. He was pitiable, he knew, but now she was the one prone and drugged in a foreign land, her face oozing pus. He didn't have anything to say to that.

[1:15] CA: "The black wolf -- your Talon." She asked, and Isaiah almost (almost) cracked the slightest of smiles. She wanted to know more, for however pitiable his story was, she still wanted to hear it. "It was him who robbed you."

[1:15] CA: "No." He said. "Not of my eye at least." He sniffed, a ragged, snotty noise. Flicked an ear. "Talon is my father." A pause. "The one who took my eye - that's still my business." He said, hoping his meaning was clear, though there were not words to describe how he felt. Hartigan was still Isaiah's, at least in his mind, and he was unwilling to continue this line of questioning.

[1:15] CA: "Maybe you understand?" Assuming that Dragon's assailants were still out there, Isaiah suspected that she'd feel the same. Whatever stood between Isaiah and Hartigan, perhaps revenge or something else, it was Isaiah's to take. Just the same - the wolf who Dragon had underestimated, the wolf who had left her like this, that wolf was Dragon's and Dragon's alone.

[2:07] RD: Yet it hadn't been the assailant's name she'd wanted, had it? The renegade had sought to uncover more on precisely what sort of indiscretion he intended to punish with her vicarious regards. Or perhaps she simply could or would not resist the predatory allure (there were so few left to her, if there had ever been many at all) of pulling apart something interesting she'd seized. Opening it up with surgical detachment, prying out something red and aching and vulnerable. Studying with no apparent remark. But here came cool denial, and she mirrored his ghost of an expression -- a smile, mirthless, that never quite came to be.

[2:07] RD: He no longer berated the world for being brutal, for striving always to maintain or restore misery and indifference. Nor perhaps would he berate her now for trying in some small way to sample a precious piece of him even as she listened and suffered its drugs and decided in the undulating haze that she would honor his request one way or another.

We can't much help what we are, in the end.

[2:07] RD: "Yes. Of course." A simple relenting, that inner set of jaws sliding back into their passive stupor. She'd never have proffered such things of her own to the little mender. Not that the kingdom responsible for her would never be held accountable in the way she wanted them to be and that if that poltergeist were allowed to flee its dilapidated house the foundation might tumble in on itself. Not that some crucial part of that old obsession had finally burned out and she had no idea what to do with the vacancy left behind. Not what she wanted to do to the one who had inflicted this, all of this, upon her with just one act of thievery. First the queen -- and then herself. Then it would finally be over.

[2:07] RD: "You may leave, Isaiah. If you wish." And she set her head back down, dismissing him with a strange, distant cordiality. "With my gratitude."

[8:55] CA: Isaiah knew the feeling of wanting to tear someone open, to see their insides as they pumped, to understand them, perhaps better than they understood themselves. But despite the number of times he'd seen the pulsing organs of a pitiful creature, he did not relish the microscope being reversed. He had already shared more with Dragon that he had with anyone else. This fascinating stranger, so hideous both inside and out, her single living eye was somehow still dead. So different from his own eyes - where they dead one still hurt like it was living.

[8:55] CA: The monster was right - we can't much help what we are. Some people were flowers - like Epee, a violet from the greenery, some were great trees with sharp thorns and golden petals - like Dragon's paladin. But Dragon was a toxic monkshood sprung from jacarandas and Isaiah was a brown mushroom, bruised and hungrily feeding on the detritus of this foolish world. There was never going to be any changing that. Flowers were flowers, corpses were corpses, things were what they were. Isaiah had been titled an Alchemist, once, given some pity rank that he had never intended to fill. But the truth was that alchemy was fiction - you could never change sulfur to gold. Dragon was a monster. Isaiah was a pitiable boy.

[8:55] CA: "Yes. Of course." She answered him. Just as Dragon would never fill the void in the hungry vacancy where her soul should be, Isaiah too would never find his salve, his panacea. They would hurt and hunger until they died, like the ugly beasts they were.

[8:55] CA: "You may leave, Isaiah. If you wish." His patient said at last, satisfied that she would pull no further meaning from this scrawny acolyte. "With my gratitude."

[8:55] CA: He nodded and rose to his feet. He stared at her wound one last time. "Next time, you won't make the same mistake. Next time you won't lose." His work had at least given her that chance.

[8:55] CA: For some reason, the encounter had left him hungry. He wondered what an eye tasted like.

[1:21] RD: His mysterious remedies placed into higher contrast the unlikely fondness she had for this misshapen changeling who, much like her, should never have been born but was here now anyway, treating her with a gentleness and care she seldom experienced, sliding just out of reach of her questioning grasp. Yet Dragon didn't operate in polarities of love and hate. Love for Beryl was possession and greed and a binding string dyed red by the blood of toppled giants and trampled causalities, hate for Inaria was obsession and addiction and existential despair suffered by a creature who had never quite figured out what it was or where it belonged, and her deciding Isaiah was to her liking would never have saved him from being ambushed and eaten for the little nutrition he'd provide had he disregarded the single, small mercy she'd given by telling him he was free to leave.

[1:21] RD: He knew that, perhaps. Intelligent boy, wise to the cruelty of the world and selfishness of its organisms when all the facades were down. He obeyed her without fuss or fanfare and, studying her ruined face a final time, moved to depart. The quiet dignity, incongruous to the ignoble knobbiness of his form, in which he did this was not missed. Dragon watched him, dimly aware that she felt no pain for the first time in nearly a year. The taste of a wolf's eye, she'd have told him if asked, is not unlike the taste of egg. When you reclaim yours, you'll see.

[1:21] RD: "No," she said, and it was a soft murmur, quiet and hoarse, void of the fervor and heat that would color another promise of this sort. Slowly, she ran her tongue over her top teeth. "I won't." Time would inevitably write that ending, whatever it became.

[1:21] RD: The renegade listened to his retreating footsteps for as long as she could make them out, then everything seemed to pulsate at once, and within seconds she knew no more.

---

The end.