[Crow]

He was long past the age where he’d so much as look twice at a half-rotten body sinking into the earth. Dead things were boring and bones were just the chaff animals left behind when they expired. But lately, he saw them and searched incuriously for a patch of red on coal, for some drop in this filthy pond that he could use to find — well, you probably know by now. He would not accept being abandoned. He would not let anyone separate them. Not even her.

The black wolf had only just stumbled upon a skeleton with a pelt sagging over it that smelled tantalizingly familiar somehow. Had he been responsible for this corpse? Crow smelled the empty eye sockets, nosed around the exposed ridges of the spinal cord, when —

A bright eye roving over, a crafty ear tilting. A smile.

“My, you’ve grown.”

[Crow]

It was almost funny, in the way. The way death had become Alteron's décor.

The new king stalked through the shadowed woodland halls unimpeded, summer heat swelling heavily against his dark coat. The smell of decay was thick in the air but far from unusual, the thrum of flies a familiar melody, as comforting as the sound of a crackling hearth. There was something else that his nose had caught though, something that pierced sharply through the sweltering rot, something that he followed now.

Something that he eventually found.

Pushing through the thick undergrowth, Cocytus approached with tongue lolling, watching Crow through gleaming candlelit eyes. "Papa," he grinned, and oh, didn't that word sound strange on his tongue? He licked his muzzle slowly, sparing the body his sire had been nosing at only a brief glance. It was an inconsequential thing in the end, as all dead things in Alteron were, its skeleton simply becoming one of many.

(And oh, were there many.)

A particularly persistent fly buzzed loudly around one of his ears, before he idly flicked it away with the tall appendage. Tail wagging lightly, Cocytus took a good, long look at the smiling stranger-not-stranger standing across from him.

"Long time, no see, eh? Ah thought yuh'd flown the coop long ago."

With dear old mama.

[Crow]

Crow had seen many dead men; he knew exactly how inconsequential they all became at the end. Had opened a lot of gurgling red throats. The droning whine of flies was familiar to him as the filler noise your brain produces in empty rooms. Someday the wheel would perhaps turn over and crunch this ambitious dragon boy beneath its weight, but that was then, this is now.

And who knows? His kin did so have a knack for sliding unscathed between the cracks of those treads. Maybe Cocytus would be something truly indomitable. Wouldn’t that be amusing?

“Not quite,” replied the burned beast, still smiling. The tip of his tail flicked twice, a little spasmodically. “Do you know where she went? She took something of mine with her, I think.”

Little Serif, of course. He couldn’t remember her mother’s name offhand.

“Two of my grandchildren were worshiped as gods in the land I came back from. Did you know that? Others were captains, warriors, high priests. And here you are with a crown on your head the very first time I meet you!”

... well, the second, but Crow wasn’t used to being corrected, so he didn’t bother to elaborate.

[Crow]

He'd been fishing for the dragon's path, however subtly. The Sun had hoped — expected, even — to find his answer in the burned man standing before him. But the line that he'd cast had come back empty in the end. The bait hadn't took.

His father didn't know.

The corners of Cocytus' mouth twitched, as if the smile still plastered there couldn't decide whether to falter or grow. Crow's own inquiry only made him shake his head. "Ah wouldn't be standin' here if ah knew." The long tail that had danced behind him before now swayed at a sedated pace, indicating some level of disappointment.

It still didn't keep him from listening though.

He'd learned from the beginning (the early beginning, the very beginning, when blistering coals were still a cradle and hungry flames were still a mewling heart) that his bloodline was a valuable one — better, a burning tongue had once whispered.

But this was the first time that the other tongue had confided a side of their own.

"Ah'm sorry yuh hafta see me wearin' it in such unexpected circumstances," he chuckled, flopping heavily to the ground, eyeing the corpse beside him, lying almost close enough for him to touch. "It's strange. Ah was a herald before all of this. Ah took people under mah wing and taught 'em how to be good. Ah certainly wasn't expectin' a crown."

And yet he'd still taken it, all the same.

"What were yuh, back where yuh came from?" he asked suddenly, amber eyes flitting to focus again on his sire. Something, perhaps curiosity, kept the younger male lying very still then, long ear barely twitching when the fly from earlier came back to buzz around it again.

What did your land of gods call you?

[Crow]

“Well,” said Crow, locking his smiling teeth a little tighter together, “I suppose that’s expected, isn’t it? When a dragon doesn’t want to be found...”

He left the rest unsaid, lingering like smoke about his lips. Cocytus might study his father now and ponder that he did not in form live up to the looming mystery that had surrounded his memory growing up. He was only a timber... a battered animal with a blind eye, silvery about the flinty muzzle, tireless and ugly as a sewer rat riddled with plague. But there was something hellishly knowing about his mien, the liquid stalk with which he moved... what had he seen, this stranger who was not quite a stranger? What hadn’t he seen?

“Don’t be silly... Cocytus, was it? Your mother’s name, not mine. I couldn’t be more tickled.” He wagged his tail a bit frenetically. “You’re an opportunist.”

A fellow White, perhaps, back in the valley.

“Oh, I played all sorts of roles. I ruled, in a way, with my grandchildren. I fought their wars. But at heart,” and here he licked his teeth, “I was keroberus. Executioner. The gods’ justice. I don’t suppose that’s changed much.”