*****

Chapter Thirty Six

*****

“I think I need a moment.” Revaramek pushed himself to his paws. He crossed the freshly restored grass on unsteady limbs, glancing at the furry little madman who suddenly seemed just a little less mad. “Maybe…several moments.”

“By all means!” The well-dressed urd’thin gave him an irritating smirk, and an exaggerated bow. “I’ve got all day! I’ve left Uncle Rekky in charge of the village in my absence, and it’s not as if I’m planning world domination.” He splayed his ears and looked at Mirelle, shrugging. “I’m really not. Not my sort of villainy.”

Mirelle made the rudest gesture Revaramek had ever seen from her.

Asterbury glanced at the sky. “We could try that, if you want, since I have a bit of free time. Though I’ve a sneaking suspicion I’d be too much for you to handle.”

Revaramek padded across Enora’s expansive meadow, towards the lake. The two gryphons started to follow him, and Revaramek flicked his tail spines to full extension, waving them off. “You two stay here till I’ve decided if I still like you or not.”

Chir’raal and Kurekka cast each other a worried glance, but settled back down onto their haunches. Enora and Aylaryl both stared at him. Enora wrung her hands, her face creased with worry. Aylaryl just looked grumpy. Revaramek snorted, grinding his sharp teeth. As if Aylaryl had any reason to be grumpy. Let her sit there and stew, he thought. Maybe her madman could go and comfort her.

“Are you alright?” Mirelle scooped up her maul and made her way around the other side of him from the others. She put her free hand on his shoulder as he walked, gently rubbing his scales. “I mean…not just…physically. But…I mean…well, everything. Are…are you alright?”

Revaramek curled his long neck to offer her a smile. Her sentiments and concern were far more touching than her bumbling attempts to put them to words. “Not really, but thank you. I shall take your struggles with coherence to mean you are also not alright.”

Mirelle scrunched her face, clenching her hand around the haft of her maul as they walked. “Think I’ve been worse but…only when I was falling out of the sky.” She shivered, and Revaramek opened his wing to drape it across her. Mirelle pressed herself against him, as if seeking the protection he offered. “This is a solid contender for the most confused and uncertain I’ve ever felt, though.”

Revaramek tightened his wing against her, savoring the comfort of her warmth and soft touch against his scales. “Only a contender? I’d say it’s solidly in first place for me, and I’ve had plenty of times I’ve felt adrift on an ocean of uncertainty.”

“There you go speaking poetically again.” Mirelle traced a finger around a single scale. “Any moment now you’re going to announce you have to piss, or your balls itch.”

“I don’t, and they do.” Revaramek rumbled his amusement, smiling. “But I only announced it because you brought it up.”

“And I only brought it up to make you smile again, which you did, so I win.”

“We were competing?” Revaramek snapped his teeth and tossed his head. “Damn!”

Mirelle laughed and leaned against him as they neared Enora’s pond. Her bright laughter so cheered him the dragon could hardly understand how he ever found it grating when they’d first met. “This is definitely the most confused I’ve ever felt, though. Wasn’t that long ago I was dragging you out of the swamp to go incinerate some bandits, and now we’re dealing with…” She gestured behind them towards Asterbury. “Whatever the hell that thing is!”

“He’s called an urd’thin, Mirelle, don’t be racist.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you…you knew that, didn’t you.” Mirelle slapped his shoulder. “You ass!”

“And now I’ve won.”

Revaramek lifted his head to gaze back over his wings. Dried blood stained his scales where fresh stitches broke in their earlier fight. With everything that happened since, the pain was a distant afterthought. Across the meadow, Asterbury strode back and forth in front of the others, gesturing wildly. Flickers of light and color followed in his wake. Moving images sprang to life above him.

“You’re right, though. I’ve no idea what he is. When we first met him, and he cut himself, his blood…” Revaramek licked his nose, the strange scent suddenly filling his mind. “It smelled like...ink and scorched parchment. And then he made us remember a place that…doesn’t…and now I don’t know if I really smelled it or he just…tricked me into thinking I did. Whatever he is, he’s far more than an urd’thin.”

“That’s surprisingly understated, for you.”

“And then all that bit about…another world?” Revaramek moved to the water’s edge to peer at his reflection. He flared his spines, staring at the gold edges of his frills. He lifted a paw, looking at the webbing between his digits. Then he curled his tail, flared its webbed spikes out into a fan-like shape. “I think I’m an alien, Mirelle!”

“And right back to regular old Revaramek.” Mirelle put her face in her hand, sighing. “I don’t think that’s what that little nutter meant.”

When Mirelle slipped out from under his wing, he lifted a forepaw and held it out to her. He splayed it to show her the pale green webbing that stretched between the middle knuckles of his fingers. “Look at my paws, Mirelle. Other than my mother, I’ve never seen another dragon with webbing like this.”

“What about your…father?” Mirelle tilted her head, concern flicking in her topaz eyes.

“Died when I was young, I think. But you heard what that crazy fuzzball said. There’s…there’s no swamp like the one I remember anywhere around here.”

“So what? It doesn’t matter where you’re from.” Mirelle took the dragon’s forepaw between her hands. Her touch was gentle comfort, warm against his thin scales and sensitive pads. “You’re part of our marsh now, you’re our dragon. It wasn’t matter…” She trailed off, blinking. “Wait, that came out far more possessively than I meant it.”

Revaramek chuckled low in his throat. He tilted his head to nuzzle at the back of one of Mirelle’s olive-skinned hands. “The thought is appreciated, nonetheless.”

When he lifted his muzzle, Mirelle traced her fingers against some of his webbing. It tickled the sensitive membrane, and his paw twitched a little, fingers waggling. Mirelle glanced up at him. “You’ll never hear me say this again, but…I think I’m glad you came to our marsh.”

Revaramek’s breath caught. His ears shot up, and a broad smile stretched across his muzzle, baring all his fangs. The sentiment so warmed the dragon’s heart he almost let it go without a sarcastic reply. Almost. “You only think you’re glad? I should imagine you’re quite ecstatic to be blessed with someone of such resplendence!”

Mirelle rolled her eyes, but did not otherwise rise to his bait.

So he tried a little harder. “You see, ecstatic means-”

 “Yes, yes, do be your usual arrogant self again. It’ll help cover up our shared embarrassment at admitting we actually like one another.”

Revaramek swiveled his ears, his webbed tail tip twitching against the grass. “I don’t recall saying I liked you.”

“You do have a selective memory, after all.” Mirelle chuckled, tickling the edge of his paw webbing, making it twitch.

“I will be sure to tell everyone I can just how much you like me, though.” Revaramek arched his neck, smiling down at her. “Of course, no one will be surprised. Who doesn’t love their benevolent overlord?”

Mirelle squeezed his hand, laughing. “You are the strangest dragon. How did you even get started on all that overlord-”

“You know, when I first saw him, he was the strangest dragon I’d ever seen, as well.”

Revaramek yanked his paw back from Mirelle when Aylaryl’s voice cut her off. He snarled, unsheathing all his claws. He turned to keep himself between Mirelle and the purple dragon, even as the woman snatched up her heavy maul again. He lowered himself into a well defended crouch, curling his tail, his spines stretched to full extension, their sharp, semi-rigid webbing on threatening display.

“Yes.” Aylaryl gestured with a forepaw at Revaramek’s tail. “Those. I’d never seen webbed tail spines like them before, nor have I seen them since. He’s definitely not from around here.”

“If you’ve come for round three, Rev and I will be more than happy to oblige!” Mirelle hefted her maul, circling around to Aylaryl’s side. “I can re-break that tail a lot easier than your maniac boyfriend fixed it!”

“He’s hardly a maniac.” Aylaryl glanced back and forth between Revaramek and Mirelle, then made a show of easing onto her haunches. Her silver-white gaze soon settled on Revaramek. “I came to…check on you.” For a second, something flickered in her shining eyes. A moment of worry, a glimpse of pain that was gone so quickly he half thought he’d imagined it. “He didn’t cut your eye, did he?”

Revaramek dug his claws into the earth, kneading ruts in the sod. “No, but only by the tiniest of fractions. I shall have nightmares about knives in my eyes, I suspect.”

“I’m sorry about that.” Aylaryl bowed her head towards her forepaws, an old gesture of draconic contrition. “I didn’t think he’d go quite that far. But you did-”

“Don’t you dare make excuses for that little mongrel!” Mirelle advanced on Aylaryl so swiftly and with her maul held so high Revaramek readied himself to leap to her aid.

“He came here to talk!” Aylaryl jerked her head back up, snarling. “And you two just decided to-”

“Oh, he came here to talk?” Mirelle thumped the head of her maul down against the ground, waving her hands. “Came here for a little chat? Wanted to have a little chitty-chatty with his old pals? Kinda like he just popped by the fishing village for a pint, a chin-wag and a bit of negotiation? Was the hearty handshake to come before or after you two decided to burn down half the village and throw me into the damn sky?”

“Mirelle!” Revaramek arched his neck, grinning despite his unease around their enemy. “Your sarcasm is getting so angry and bitter. I quite like this side of you!”

“That was different!” Aylaryl growled under her breath, flaring her black-mottled purple wings.

“Yes, it was!” Mirelle hefted up her maul again. “Because this time we weren’t going to let you trick us into letting our guard down again! So why don’t you sit right there and tell us just exactly what you came over here for. And don’t get up until one of us gives you permission or I’m burying this maul in the first part of you I can reach.”

“Exactly!” Revaramek flicked his wings open, showed off their copper splotches, and then folded them again. He waved a copper-stripped forelimb at Mirelle. “What she said.”

“It is as I said.” Aylaryl’s voice rose, a barely restrained snarl. Her body tensed and her wings trembled as she glared at Mirelle. Revaramek coiled his strength, ready to launch himself straight into the female dragon if she made a move for his friend. Even when Aylaryl sighed and relaxed, Revaramek did not yet do the same. She finally tore her smoldering, silvery-white gaze away from Mirelle, and fixed it once more upon the green dragon. “I wanted to make sure you were alright.”

“That’d be a lot more believable if you hadn’t just tried to kill him!” Mirelle hefted her maul, working her hands against the haft.

“I was protecting Asterbury!” Aylaryl flexed her blue paws against the earth.

Revaramek took a slow, cautious step towards her, his own bronze eyes locked upon the female dragon. He had no intention of taking her at her word until she’d given him reason to feel safe in doing so. “And who were you protecting in the village, when you decided to ‘negotiate’ with your claws and teeth?”

“I just wanted to kick your ass!” Aylaryl hissed, flaring her own wings once more.

“You used your fire!”

“I got carried away!” Aylaryl snapped at him, glanced at Mirelle, then softened her tone when she turned her wedge-shaped back to Revaramek. “I didn’t want to…I just wanted to kick your ass!”

“So you said.”

Aylaryl took in a slow breath, her purple and black wings draped across the grass at her sides. “I didn’t want to kill you.” She tossed her head over her back towards the others. “And I didn’t want to see him blind you.”

Mirelle stomped a boot. “So you’d have just looked the other way?”

“If you’d let go of your personal feelings for a moment, you’d realize I was the one who finally talked him out of taking an eye.” Aylaryl’s tail curled behind her.

“Oh excuse me, my personal feelings?” Mirelle snarled as if she were trying to emulate the two angry dragons. “I personally remember you throwing me to my certain death!”

“He wasn’t supposed to wake up so fast!” Aylaryl flared all her spines, waving unsheathed claws at Revaramek. “It surprised us both! Asterbury wanted to test him! He’d either do the impossible and save you, or you’d get what you deserved!”

“What I deserved? For protecting my people? And what if he killed himself?” Mirelle shouted at the female, thrusting a finger at Revaramek. “What if he died, would that be what he deserved, too? Just because I wanted to help my village and roped him into it, we both deserve to die?”

“No!” Aylaryl tipped her head back and spat a gout of fire into the sky. The heat from the roiling, red-orange flame washed over Revaramek, but Mirelle didn’t even recoil. Revaramek had to admit, if he wasn’t worried that this argument might devolve into battle again, he’d be impressed by her fortitude. “He was supposed to let you die! Then he might well have finally had reason to let your stupid village go. I might have had a chance to convince him of what’s real, of what’s right again. I didn’t think he’d almost kill himself just to play hero!”

Revaramek shot out of his crouch and stalked towards Alyaryl, his wings flared, anger raging in his pounding heart, heating his blood. He’d had about enough of this. “I wasn’t trying to play hero, you deluded idiot! I was doing what was right! I was saving a life! You’re the one burning homes and smashing up villages! You’re doing exactly what they used to hunt us for! You’re…making yourself the monster they thought we were!”

“Better than licking their damn murdering boots!” Aylaryl jumped back to her own paws just as fast. “After all they did to us, to me, and still you won’t break ranks with them! I thought maybe if you failed to save their precious leader, they’d-”

“They’d what?” Revaramek came to a stop just in front of her, fangs bared, spines flared and trembling in anger, gold frills on full display. “Cast me out? Sever the truce? Set me free? I’m not their prisoner, Aylaryl!”

“Yes you are! You just don’t see-”

“And Mirelle’s not just their leader, or their council woman! She’s my friend! You tried to murder my friend!”

“She murdered my-”

“She didn’t have anything to do with that!” Revaramek’s voice rose into a furious roar, his words echoing across the meadow. “She wasn’t even born then! Even Enora was still young when they purged us! Mirelle’s a good person, one of the best people I’ve known, and you tried to kill her for something other people did! You have every right to hate me, but you damn well leave Mirelle out of this!”

“I think I’m pretty well stuck in it now, Rev, but I appreciate your concern just the same.” Mirelle glanced back and forth between the two of them, shifting her maul. “So…are we…”

“Aylaryl!” Enora’s voice echoed back to them, angry and worry filled it in equal measure. “You’ve shed more than enough of each other’s blood for one day! Swallow your gods-damned pride, just this once!”

Revaramek fixed his eyes upon Aylaryl, watching her closely, ready for any sign of continued aggression. As Enora’s words settled over her, her frills sagged back against her head, and breath by angry, panting breath, her fury drained from her like blood spilling from a deep wound. With a great, heaving sigh, the purple dragon flopped onto her belly, her head against the ground. She stared out across the lake. The reflection of late afternoon sunlight on water glittered in her eyes.

“Did he even tell you?” Aylaryl lifted a forepaw to flick her claws towards Mirelle. “About us?”

Mirelle stared at the female dragon for long, silent moments. She glanced at Revaramek, then hefted her maul over her shoulder. “We haven’t exactly had time or desire to talk about past relationships. But he did imply that you were…” She glanced back at him, and Revaramek nodded. “Lovers, before, and that now you think he’s a…”

“Traitor.” Alyaryl spat the word like acidic bile.

Revaramek’s spines bristled. Anger tingled at the base of his frills, even as cold tines of regret pressed to his heart. “It isn’t fair of you to call me that.”

“Fair has nothing to do with it.” She snapped her teeth, hissing. “Traitor.”

“You’re just asking for another ass-kicking!” Mirelle lifted her maul off her shoulder, hefting it.

Aylaryl lifted her head, but did not rise. “Another?” She flicked her ears back. “You haven’t given me the first one, yet.”

“The fact you had to have your fuzzy little lunatic come heal you while you were squealing about your tail says otherwise!” Revaramek hissed through his teeth, then swung his head towards Mirelle to get her to back up a few paces. “Why are you serving him, anyway?”

“Oh, is this where I explain my reasoning to you, like in one of your precious tales?” The purple dragon sneered, then twisted her neck to glare at Mirelle. “Shall I play along with your deluded slave? Revaramek’s a traitor, because he serves you. You and your band of murderers. I don’t ‘serve’ Asterbury, I help him because he’s the only family I have, now.” She turned her glare back to Revaramek, and the flickering moment of moment of icy anguish in her silver-white eyes left him withering beneath his scales. For a second, he saw her as he knew her when they were young. Alone and afraid, drifting on an ocean of cold loneliness, desperate for a warm touch to cling to, a sheltering wing to hide beneath. “And unlike you, he won’t-”

“The council’s men killed her family.” He may as well have sunk his teeth into her throat. She recoiled, on her feet and backing away in an instant. “Her mother, her father-”

“Don’t you speak of them!” Alyaryl tensed, panting, all her spines standing on end.

“They shot her father out of the sky with…” Revaramek swallowed a few times to try and clear his clenching throat. His eyes burned, his belly lurched. “A big…I don’t know what to call it. Like a big crossbow. I don’t think they have it anymore. He…he fell. Tumbled. I think he was dead when he hit the earth. She screamed and…she was going to go after him, but, I couldn’t let her…they’d have…” Revaramek’s voice broke, and he glanced away.

“This is not your story to tell!” Aylaryl snarled at him, her wings shaking at her sides.

“Then you tell it!” Revaramek snapped right back at her, fury and sorrow heating his blood in equal measure. “People call me deluded because I don’t like to think about the worst parts of my life, because I lose myself in better things! Yet when I’m pushed to think of them, when I’m called to speak of them, and I do, people get angry. Well, which is it? Do you want me to tell Mirelle about us, or would you rather I make up another tale? If you want to tell her yourself, she’s right here, waiting!” Revaramek gestured at Mirelle.

“You were my friend!” Alyaryl hissed, her smoldering, silver-white eyes boring deep into Revaramek. “I cared for you! I thought you cared for me!”

“I did!” Revaramek snarled, lashing his spined tail against the bank of the lake, splashing mud and water. “I cared for you, too! I was your friend, but you’re the one who-”

“I loved you!” Alyaryl’s voice was a furious, shaking whisper that cut Revaramek to his heart. “Did you know that? Or were you too lost in your little stories to figure that out?”

Revaramek faltered. His heart sank into his belly, and with it his very soul trembled and cracked. He worked his jaws but no words came. He could not even find the strength to force air into his lungs.

Alyaryl hung her head. Her voice was an aimless whisper directed at no one, yet lingering everywhere. “I loved you, back then, but I didn’t understand it at the time. You were so unlike any dragon I’d ever known. And so kind to me, when I needed it most. You were shelter when I was broken and bared to the world. When I was lost and ready to die, you called me home and made me want to live again. Maybe it was just my youth, and my pain, but I was starting to think I might want to spend my life with you, some day.” She took a deep breath, and let it out in a slow, shuddering sigh. “And then you plunged your claws into my heart, and cut it out of me.”

Revaramek swallowed a few times, but could not dislodge the lump from his throat. He blinked, and the hot tears that welled in his bronze eyes ran down his green scales. More replaced them just as swiftly. Mirelle dropped her maul and went to the dragon to wipe tears from his muzzle. She put an arm around his neck, hugging him, and he pressed gently into her silent comfort.

He forced ragged words. “That wasn’t…how it was…”

“You chose the murderers over me.”

“I gave my word…”

“For your fairy tales!”

“Mother always said a hero would…”

“For some notion of honor you don’t even understand!”

“I couldn’t break my word, once given.”

“No.” Bitterness began to replace the pain in Aylaryl’s voice, growing with every word. “No, of course not. All your precious stories, their heroes would never break their word, would they? Not even when that word was only given at sword-point, when you lay terrified, bloodied and broken, willing to swear yourself to anything they asked of you if it meant they’d spare your life. No, there’d be no honor at all in breaking that word, would there? Better to keep the promise you only made in exchange for your life to the men who murdered our people, than to break it to help your own kind protect themselves!”

“You didn’t want protection. You wanted revenge.”

“Cause I had no one left to protect! Just you, and Enora! You swore yourself to the murderers, and they banished Enora, so what else was I to long for but revenge?”

“I couldn’t betray their trust, I couldn’t-”

“So you betrayed me, instead! You betrayed Enora!” Aylaryl lashed her tail like a whip, scything through long grass. Her voice began as an ember, sparking into flame as she snarled every word. “The two people who cared most about you in all your misspent life are the only two people you were willing to betray. They exiled Enora from her own home because she cared about you, because she tried to warn us they were coming! Because she saved your life when she convinced them to spare you!”

“For the truce!”

“That was just to stop them from killing you, you thick-skulled, fairy-tale obsessed idiot! You put her in that position! She warned us they were coming because she wanted us to flee! She didn’t want what happened to my family, to the other dragons, to the gryphons, she didn’t want that to happen to us! I left, but you? No, you and your overlord bullshit decided to stay!” She flared out a single wing to its full extent, waving it in the air. She turned her head, spat another burst of swirling red-orange flame. The heat washed over Revaramek. “And what happened? They beat you half to death, and they would have finished the job if not for Enora! She only backed the idea of that so-called truce because it was the only way she could think to save your stupid life!”

“What did you expect him to do?” Mirelle broke her silence with a shouted accusation. He thrust her finger at Aylaryl. “You said it yourself, he was young, terrified, hurt! Would you not swear the same thing in his place, if it meant you’d live another day?”

Aylaryl rumbled, a low, menacing sound emanating from deep within her purple-plated chest. She leveled her white-hot glare at Mirelle, her spines flared. “Of course I would. But that’s not the point, that’s not when he betrayed us. I was overjoyed when I found out he’d survived. I thought they were going to kill him. I thought myself a coward for fleeing, even though I knew I was not yet ready to stand against them. He was braver than I, that day, though also far more foolish. I believed Enora a genius to have come up with it, to take the idea of truce they’d floated, wanting themselves a guardian, and to use it to save his life. But that’s just it. It was only ever meant to spare his life. Enora didn’t expect the truce to last, she expected Revaramek to turn his back on you and your murderous council as soon he was healthy again.”

The purple dragon coiled her tail, half-furling both black-mottled wings. She shifted, claws dragged through the grass as she turned her head towards Revaramek. “Enora thought you’d fly from that place with her, for good! She thought when they banished her, the three of us could leave, together. How could she have known you’d choose to serve the slayers? And why? All because some made-up hero in a story your mother told you would have kept his word, even to his enemy!”

Emptiness filled Revaramek. His heart was a hollow pit the rest of him was slowly crumbling into. “I couldn’t break my word.”

“No.” Aylaryl’s voice was once more bitterness and bile. “Of course not. Why betray your enslavers when you could turn your back on your friends, instead? That was the betrayal, Revaramek. That day, out here, in this place.” She waved her paw at the meadow and Enora’s home beyond it. “Years after my family was dead, years after they forced you to swear yourself to that truce. When we asked you to-”

“You wanted me to use their trust against them.” Revaramek turned his head away, flattening back his spines. “To trick them, to help you kill them! It was…not fair of you to ask that of me.”

“Fair?” Aylaryl struck the earth with unsheathed claws, hurling clumps of shorn sod into the air. “They murdered us, Revaramek! My father was protecting his home, our home, and they shot him from the sky! My mother was protecting me and they put spears in her! Was that fair? That marsh, that hill, that was our land, that was dragon land! They murdered us to tear it from our claws so their colonists could steal another home! I didn’t know that, then, but I know it now. You want to talk about what’s fair, Revaramek, then answer me this! Which is more fair, that our families should die so that our lands can be claimed, or that their guardian turns against them to take it back?”

“Neither.” Revaramek stared at the copper marks upon his forepaws. “Neither is fair.”

Aylaryl only snorted, shaking her spines. “Maybe it’s because you’re not from here. Maybe you don’t understand because it’s not truly your home. Not that I knew that, back then. It doesn’t matter, anyway. When you chose to abide the truce, and protect those who claimed our homes, soaked in our blood? You betrayed not only me, but every dragon who once lived in that marsh. And when you crawled back to them, you betrayed Enora. You never had to go back to them. You could have stayed here. Instead, you chose to turn your back on her and serve those who exiled her.”

“That’s…that’s not how it was.”

“Yes.” Alyaryl snapped her teeth, her every word a growled syllable. “It is. And you know it. You know what you did to her when she asked you to stay, and you said no. When you chose the town that killed my family, that nearly murdered you, that cast her out, when you chose them over her, you know what that did to her.”

“I still visit as often as I-”

“You knew how deeply your claws cut us both, and so you told yourself a story where it never happened! You made yourself some kind of…” She waved a paw, claws unsheathed in the air. “Overlord in your own mind. You wrapped yourself up in it so completely you could almost forget reality. Maybe you really do. I know you were like that when you were young, and trying to comfort yourself. You’d lose yourself so completely some days I could scarcely reach you. I know where it started, when you needed comfort. So you spun yourself into the stories your mother had the maidens read you, to teach you to speak their tongue, to keep you company when she was gone. No one could begrudge you wanting to escape from that loneliness. But this?” She tossed her head towards Enora, watching from a distance alongside Asterbury and the gryphons. “You did this. She wanted you to stay. I wanted you to stay.”

“You wanted revenge…” Revaramek managed only a murmur.

“I wanted a family again.” Aylaryl took a deep breath, and an eerie smile spread across her muzzle. “And now I have one. Enora and I…we wandered. Sometimes together, sometimes apart. Met a lot of people who’d been affected the same way by the same kind of people. And one day, we met him. And in him I found someone who truly understood me, understood what I’d been through…and he found the same thing in me. And over the years, he and Enora and our other friends …we all came to know one another very well. For a time, we even knew peace. But the more he learned of my pain, of those who caused it…well…then he learned about you.”

A chill settled at the base of Revaramek’s frills, then slid down his spine, like a single claw clicking against every scale. “What about me?”

“That you’re from a great, poisoned swamp that only exists in another world. And that you and your mother somehow did the one thing he can’t.” She cocked her head, glanced at Mirelle, then fixed her eyes on Revaramek again. “You’re going to have to tell him how you came here.”

Revaramek grit his teeth, curling his spined tail. Aylaryl’s change of subject left his head spinning. He wasn’t sure if she’d done that just to manipulate him, or if she’d simply been trying to escape the pain herself. “I don’t know, Aylaryl. I was only a hatchling. I…remember…the smell, the light, then the darkness…it was cold. There was…a tower, or…a ruin, I think.”

“That’s a start.” Ayaryl licked her nose, then slunk forward a few steps, her head low. “I’ve had my chance to kick the hell out of you, and now I’ll tell you this. Somewhere in my wounded heart, I still care enough about you that I want you to survive this. He won’t take no for an answer. You need to understand that.”

Revaramek glanced down at Mirelle, hardening himself inside. He coiled his claws around his pain, and pulled it aside, wrapping his heart in iron. He told himself he was a hero. He could do heroic things. He had done heroic things. “I won’t let you two hurt that town again.”

Aylaryl snorted, a sneer crossing her purple muzzle. “I don’t care about your village anymore. It’s cute, though. You still think you could stop him.”

“I saved Mirelle, didn’t I?”

“You’ve no idea what he can-”

“And you saw what I did to his arm!” Revaramek curled his neck, glaring at Aylaryl.

“Yes, look how long that troubled him. Or maybe you missed the part where he laughed it off.” She stretched her neck, nipped at his chin. Her sharp teeth threatened to break thin scales, but Revaramek did not flinch or pull back. “You’ve pressed your luck far enough, Revaramek. He really did just come here to talk, you know. Asterbury and I…and the others, too. We’re like a family now. But for all the animosity between us, there’s still a place for you at the table, if you want it.” She pulled her head back long enough to glance at Mirelle. “You too, I suppose, if you’re half the person he thinks you are. Enora’s going to need another voice on her new council, after all.”

Mirelle balled her fists, moving towards her maul again. “You leave poor Revaramek alone! No one wants a place any table set by your family of lunatics! Wait, what do you mean Enora’s-”

“You’ll see when it’s all finished. Until then, don’t make us-”

Revaramek growled, low at first and slowly rising. He flicked his tail spines out, unsheathed his claws. “I’m not afraid of either of you.”

Aylaryl turned back towards him. She rubbed her muzzle against his pebbly scaled cheek, whispering. “You’ve grown so brave. But you’ve no concept of the forces you’re toying with. For all the effort you put into convincing yourself your whole life is a story, it’s turned out to be truer than you ever realized. But Asterbury’s the one telling the story now. Don’t make him write you out of it.”

Mirelle spat as she hoisted up her maul. “Quit talking like he’s some kind of God! We’ve already proved he’s vulnerable, we can do it again.”

Aylaryl eased back from Revaramek. She perked her ears, her voice a condescending purr. “Sure you can. You want to know what he can do? What he can really do? Go ask Enora how old she is. But do it quickly. I promise you, you don’t want him to run out of patience again.”

*****

Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed, please leave a comment with your thoughts, and don't forget to click the FAVE Button! See you next chapter.