Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Sometimes I wonder if I should rescind my vow of non-interference, considering the dire straits we find ourselves in now. This war… it is the first time in a thousand years all the dragon clans- Divine, Fire, Silent, Earth, and Ice- have gone to war. But this time, it is not against one of our own that we fight. It is against humans, and despite how tiny and short-lived they are, the outcome of who will inherit the continent is… very unsure.

Humans are right to see us as a threat- they are small, and weak, and are completely landbound. They have some small advantages, certainly- they outnumber us, but in the way flies outnumber the beast of burden. They should have been easily squashed.

Hah! How arrogant we were, thinking that way. Humans and their great armies, thousands working in tandem, are enough to fell even whole families of dragons. But they also had help.

Tempus, Chief of the Divine Dragon clan, posited that our race is dying. Fewer and fewer drachlings are born each century, and only a fraction of our people are not barren. Madness plagues those who were once the oldest and wisest of us, and while sealing our power in dragonstones and taking a human form may stave off the degeneration in our younger members, even that is futile when there are no young dragons being born at all.

Tempus the Incandescent sided with the humans, and gave some of them her blood, and her magic: the spell Narga. Her crusaders, wielding this magic, turned the tide just enough to bind humanity as the world’s dominant people. Though Tempus is my chief, I did not follow her.

Tacitus the Immovable, the Earth clan’s heir, rallied the remaining clans to his side, vowing to wipe out the humans as a threat to our people and way of life, just as humans fight to wipe us out as a threat to their people and way of life. Though Tacitus is one of my own people, I did not follow him. I remain ever on the sidelines, watching, writing what I see with these strange human hands, in a form I am not yet familiar with.

This is a war for the future- whether it be a human future or a draconic one, I know not. May the spirits of those passed watch over us all.”

-Ilah the Judge, renowned lawkeeper and philosopher of the Divine Dragon clan.

--

Muriel closed the book, disappointed that even a seven-hundred-year-old memoir from an actual dragon was stuff she already knew! Huffing, she reached to flip through the next volume of the now-towering stack of books on the Crusaders’ War, and dragons themselves. At least there were enough volumes around her that they shielded Mu’s position on the library floor like a leatherbound fortress. And it was good those Mafia guys weren’t exactly intellectuals, so she was unlikely to be disturbed as she dug into the texts for what would hopefully be those goons’ downfall.

“Draconic degeneration is observed primarily in older individuals in their species, and though their rationality diminishes, they are more dangerous than others of their kind. Indications included-” Nah, Mu didn’t care about the dragons that were a few knots short of a fishnet.

“And though it was my honor for my presence to rally my soldier’s morale, the sight before us shook me to my bones as surely as it shook the very ground beneath my feet. Like a fortress that walked-” Recounts from old battles were always cool, and Mu loved listening in when Mr. Luka would read the passages to the younger kids, even though she was sixteen and thus too old for those lessons… Well, as cool as it was, it was kinda useless to her. She needed a dragon now, not dragons from seven centuries ago.

“Though their natural decline was inevitable, the dragons adapted remarkably fast in the millenia before their downfall to compensate for their sharply-declining birth rate. A dragon may both sire and bear children, and socially it was observed by some humans-” Oh, gross! She didn’t need to know that stuff about dragons!

“Dragons and their titles are as inseparable as humans and our names. The list compiled details the major draconic players in the Crusaders’ War, and why such titles-” Boring!

One of the books turned out to… not really be a book. Slim, and really old, the yellow-edged pages crinkled in Mu’s grasp as she turned the pages, curious- she did find this crammed behind a bunch of other moldering books in the far corner of the library.

“Dragon’s souls are powerful, dangerous, even separated from their bodies. The spirits imprisoned in the convent’s vault are my most sacred charge. Even for all my discipline, for all my dedication to learning magic in all its forms, I find myself so tempted to open the vault and destroy the dragons, in the futile wish that it would truly free our world from their influence, both conscious and unconscious. But it is indeed a futile wish. Though instinct calls me to wipe away what threatens me and my people, body and mind, I know I cannot. Releasing their souls would only invite fire to rain down upon all our heads.

Writing such desires eases the fear, the urge. But it does not erase it. I pray my successors are stronger-willed than I, even knowing what sleeps in the iron crypt at our convent’s core.

With the blessing of the tides,

High Sage Galle.”

Mu almost dropped the- the journal. It was a journal, from the High Sage who had been in charge of the convent during the Crusaders’ War. And, sure, the convent was an old complex. It was home to the parentless children of Pelan, who were fed and housed and educated by the scholars and monks and mages who passed down their crafts.

But it was also a hidden treasure chest. Dragons! Dragons were the only thing powerful enough that Mu could think of, something to rain death on the Mafia invaders’ heads from above. Not just drive out, but destroy all of them, break the occupation’s back as surely as a wishbone in a child’s hand.

Everyone at her home island was so beaten down. Like the wave-battered stones on the coast, smoothed by centuries of storms. So Mu was… on her own. And the only thing she knew for sure could take out armies by itself was a dragon’s power, like how Tempus’s Crusaders could single-handedly end a siege just with one cast of Narga!

And she was one step closer to beating the Mafia back after they conquered her people! More than one step closer, given her weapons of choice were right beneath her feet. She even knew where the vault was! Which was kind of obvious, given it was a huge, windowless iron door in the convent’s far-west wing, and nobody could open it, no matter how hard they yanked on the handle.

But the important thing was that Mu was pretty sure she already knew how to get into it.

The memory was somewhat fuzzy- it had been over a year ago, after all- but Mu always enjoyed creeping around the convent after lamps-out, seeing how well she could blend in amongst the shadow-lit halls and test how long she could follow one of the adults before they noticed and shuffled her back to bed.

One night stood out in her memory, though- moons before the Mafia landed on their shores. Lit pale white by the moon’s glow through the windows, High Sage Maradoth had been talking to Mr. Luka in low, serious tones.

It was no secret the High Sage was training Luka to inherit the position. Sure, Luka had been picked up at Pelan’s back-streets, sick and just this side of starving to death- the monks brought in a lot of luckless beggars to care for in their ‘humanitarian duty’. But Luka had stuck around longer, and eventually became a permanent fixture as a teacher, because he was apparently educated. Very well-educated. Such a place of learning knew better than to let a man like that go. And he’d been happy to stay and teach; even if he was really jumpy the first few years, Luka was Mu’s favorite magic mentor.

Luka probably didn’t know what he was getting into when the High Sage started training him to take his place eventually. Dragon’s souls were above most people’s paygrade, Mu figured.

But he knew how to get in, as High Sage Maradoth showed him, unaware that Mu was watching them both, committing the details of the vault’s magic to memory, just for the fun of it.

When she cracked open the vault, it wouldn’t be for fun. Mu was on a mission. She was going to free her island from the Mafia, even if she had to use humanity’s long-defeated enemy to do it.

Besides. The dragon souls were trapped. So dragons themselves couldn’t be that hard to control.

Chapter Text

The Pelan Isle, even as divided from the main continent by the sea as it was, had seen its fair share of battles. The island’s small army, a mere fraction of humanity’s army, had defeated the Fire Dragons nesting in the active volcano Falamand in the island’s center, and the Silent Dragons living in its coastal waters.

The Crusaders’ War- called as such for the dragon Tempus’s allied human ‘Crusaders’ and their tide-turning war-spells- ended, yet there was still business to attend to. Such as the business enclosed in a letter, sent directly to the High Sage of the Pelan’s convent herself.

High Sage Galle gladly attended to this business personally. After the destruction the dragons wrought, it was only the responsible thing, to ensure it would never happen again.

The messenger carrying such deadly cargo was a surprise, though.

“Crusader Theodora,” Galle wasn’t sure to bow or to clasp the gray-haired woman’s forearm the way military folk did. She settled for dipping her head in respect. “I’m honored you saw to personally delivering the items you requested to be locked and guarded.”

Theodora shrugged the rucksack further up her shoulder- a deceptively simple thing, for what forces it held within. “Of course. Lady Tempus bade us to use our best judgement, before she abandoned her mortal body and ascended as a spirit. Your island is remote, and your convent is renowned for barriers and magical protections. I’m sure these will be safe here.”

“Of course they will.” Galle tried not to sniff too haughtily- keying gates and locks to a specific Unlock staff was meticulous and skilled work, after all. “Follow me, please.”

Aware of Theodora peering curiously over her shoulder as they arrived at the vault door- a simple thing, oak sheathed in iron- Galle pinged the door with the Unlock staff’s magic, each pulse perfectly timed.

The door swung open on the twelfth ping, casting weak beams of light into a bare room holding nothing but a few shelves. Striding inside, Theodora knocked on the walls appreciatively. “You really do know your stuff, huh? Nice to know these guys won’t be going anywhere anytime soon,” she said, dropping the sack to the ground and opening it.

Galle couldn’t help herself. Bending down, she retrieved the first item she saw- a moon-faced mask. “So these are- they’re really dragon souls?”

“Yup. Dragons are hard to kill all the way- gotta destroy the body and the soul. Otherwise you either get a spirit that can revive the body, or a degenerated, soulless husk that cares for nothing but destruction.” Theodora retrieved a black-bound book from the sack and hefted it, illustrating her point. “We caught as many as we could, but most of the others wised up and left our lands after we killed Tacitus the Immovable. Means there’s less to keep up with, at least.”

“Indeed,” Galle agreed, placing the mask on the shelf and reaching for a new soul-bound object. A sword-sheath went on the shelf below, and then was joined by a hand-harp, and then a chalice. Conversationally, she added “How does one bind a dragon’s soul to these things? I imagine they weren’t exactly… cooperative.”

Theodora froze to stare at Galle, gripping the book still in her grasp with enough force that it must have left marks on the leather. Finally, she stepped beside Galle, placing it on the shelf with the rest of the soul-containers. “... With their blood.”

At Galle’s naked shock, she elaborated. “Dragons’ blood is both their greatest strength- binding their soul so inextricably to their vessel that even death of the body cannot truly kill them- and their greatest weakness, as that same blood-bind is what we used to trap them. And if they bind themselves to humans using that selfsame blood...” Almost contemplatively, Theodora flexed her gauntleted hand, and Galle felt the coiled power winding beneath that armor. “Casting Narga… it’s like nothing you can dream of. Imagine the sunbeams through the clouds were the fangs of some great beast, and you may understand.”

“The power to fell armies… and to fell dragons,” Galle whispered, in awe despite herself. She’d mastered many a spell, Anima and Dark and Light and Staves, but this was a magic she could never touch. The specific magic afforded to humans blood-bound by Tempus to be humanity’s defenders- their crusaders- was something only they had the ability to cast.

“Yeah. And that power is especially damaging to dragons.” Theodora’s smile became crooked, teasing. “It’s good luck nobody on the other side bucked up and allied with humans- can you imagine a bunch of people running around with dragon-pact spells? The continent wouldn’t be in one piece!”

Theodora might have been grinning at her own joke, but Galle shuddered to think of what magic could be bestowed to humans blood-bound to dragons of other clans, if Divine Dragon spells cut dragons out of the sky with sun-spear fangs and cast entire battalions into dust. Would Ice Dragon pact-magic grind mountains beneath glaciers? Would Fire Dragon pact-magic raise a volcano beneath an army’s feet? Would Earth Dragons give humans the spells to block out the sun and crack shadows into the very earth? Could humans make a blood-pact with a Silent Dragon and call storms to submerge entire islands?

Looking back upon the seemingly-innocuous items and knowing the power of the things they contained, Galle couldn’t help but shudder as she closed the vault door.

If Crusaders eventually became stronger than even the dragons they made a blood-pact with, perhaps it was better that such power was sealed from everyone’s reach.

Galle locked the door- twelve more pulses of the synced Unlock staff, only able to be opened by that same staff and number of specifically-timed pings.

Though the vault door would open many times as its guardians passed its secrets from one High Sage to another, the souls it held would remain undisturbed for seven hundred years.

--

Under the deep blue of the night-bathed convent, Mu crept through the halls.

She’d been prepared for this. Before leaving her room, she had packed her rucksack with the essentials- travel-tough fish jerky and biscuits, a waterskin, a few coin purses purloined from the Mafia on the streets- and hidden it beneath her bed for later. She’d put on her rain-treated travel cloak and toughest set of boots, which made it more difficult to muffle her steps but she was more than up to the challenge.

First, High Sage Maradoth’s office. Or, well, it used to be his office. Luka was technically supposed to fill the position, but he hadn’t been anywhere near finished with his training before Maradoth perished on the beaches in an attempt to keep the invading fleet at bay.

Nobody had been inside for months, not even to dust, so it was painfully easy to slip inside and grab the time-smoothed Unlock staff from its perch in the corner.

Now, for the vault itself.

Down the stairs, two turns to the left, one to the through the hallway-

Voices. Both of them familiar, though only one was welcome. Huddled behind a pillar and staff clutched to her chest, Mu listened.

“I told you, I don’t know how to get in!” That was Luka’s voice, and Mu’s heart caught because she knew he could get into the vault; if he was lying, he had a damn good reason to.

“Hmm. Mafia has tried opening vault. Mafia is very strong! But door withstand even Mafia’s punches.” Mu jerked in place as the demonstrative thud echoed through the hallway, the Mafia seemingly unfazed after he punched solid iron. “If little mage-man know key, then Mafia need him alive! So for now… Mafia has proposition.”

Mu couldn’t see Luka, but it was all too easy to hear the wire-tight tension in his voice. “And that proposition is?”

“Noble in Omnoc is offering gold for what is inside! Enough for Mafia to be rich as Lady of the Metro! So if little mage man opens vault, he can have a small cut of gold.”

Ugh, figures. Really, these guys were basically pirates, so Mu should have seen this coming.

“I told you, I don’t know,” Luka said, impatience in his voice almost hiding the salt-sound of fear underlying it. “And since you shot the High Sage out of a cannon, we can’t exactly ask him, now can we?”

“Pah! Old magic-man sank fourth of fleet! Deserved the cannon!” one of the goons said decisively. “Mafia will be back tomorrow. Little mage-man better have magic password by then. Noble is impatient, and Mafia does not like being under deadline.”

An audible scoff. “Oh, sure, I’ll just pull my magic lockpick out of my ass, or maybe summon Maradoth back from the spirit- urk!”

Mu flinched back at the sound of flesh slamming into stone, hard enough that she felt the subtle vibrations along the wall she was pressed against. Prepared to cast Fire, because it might be the only spell that she knew, but she was good at Anima magic, and the secrecy of her mission wasn’t worth Luka’s life-

The sound of sandaled feet hitting the ground echoed in the hall as their owner was finally released from the goon’s grip. “Was not request,” the Mafia said gruffly over the sounds of Luka’s hacking coughs. “Mafia be back tomorrow.”

Mu stayed in place as the Mafia’s footsteps followed them out of the convent, staff tight to her side. She stayed still even as Luka heaved a thunderous sigh, and retreated the other direction. She hoped he was okay, but… she couldn’t let him see her out of bed. Especially if the Mafia were pressuring him to open the same vault she was about to pilfer.

She would have to just… be extra sure he didn’t see her on the way out.

Once the only thing she could hear was her own breathing, Mu slid from shadow to shadow, until she was standing before the iron-sheathed vault door. It looked far less imposing from this close, somehow. Like a metal closet-door.

Unsure of where to point it, Mu settled for angling the staff towards the handle. Twelve pulses, she remembered. Timed… just so…

A faint hum, like the muted sounds of wind whipping through palms.

Click.

Mu afforded herself a glance in both directions before scurrying inside the vault, gently closing the door behind her.

She saw… nothing. Dark as a moonless midnight. After groping around for the nearest wall to prop the Unlock staff against, Mu lit a small Fire spell in her hand, aware she needed to conserve her energy judiciously.

The room was… disappointingly small. And bare, aside from a few shelves. Still, there was something… unnaturally quiet about it. Like a corpse-wind off the waters where ships sank and Unsanctified haunted the waves.

Shivering against a chill that wasn’t actually there, Mu crept to the shelves, raising her cradled fire up for a better view.

She picked up the nearest… vessel, she supposed she could call it. A hand-sized book- bound in black leather, and small enough for her to open and hold it easily in one hand. And she did open it- only to discover it was blank.

Huffing in disappointment, Mu tucked it under her fire-casting arm and skimmed her fingers over the other dragon souls. A moon-shaped mask, or hmm, the sword-scabbard seemed like a good one-

Mu saw the light beam across the room before she heard the bang. But only barely.

Thinking only of hiding her reason for being here, she dropped the thin book inside her tunic, whirling around with a real cast of Fire ready to travel from mind to body to air-

“Aha! Mafia knew there was way inside!”

Uh-oh.

Time to make a run for it, then. At least this way, Luka wouldn’t get messed up trying to keep the vault locked.

The tiny fire-disc Mu flung at the nearest Mafia exploded in his face, and Mu didn’t bother waiting around to see how charred he was before she took a running leap over his flailing body, flying past the threshold and into the open-

Choking, as a hand fisted on the back of her cloak, yanking her back into a sprawling stumble.

Snarling like one of the mean little salt-weasels that hung around the docks, Mu fought just as hard as one, clawing and thrashing against the Mafia goon’s arm as he pinned her to his side like she was just a misbehaving goose instead of the force that would be their death-!

“Door is open, which means big money for Mafia!” the goon rumbled, frustratingly unfazed as Mu attempted to turn her head far enough to bite him. “So Mafia not shoot girl out of cannon for Fireball attack. Take to jail instead.” He chuffed at himself, clearly pleased with his expert negotiation skills. “See? Mafia not as bad as could have been!”

Mu replied by redoubling her efforts to wiggle her arms free so she could burn his face off too.

--

Mu was treated just as much like a misbehaving goose at the gaol as she was when pinned in a Mafia’s deathgrip.

That was to say, hitting the bare stone floor hurt, even if she managed to just barely avoid cracking her head on the ground. At least the Mafia were either too confident or too stupid to station a guard, and instead the goon pocketed the key to her cell, waltzing away to presumably help his fellows empty the vault of dragons’ souls.

Mu allowed herself a few moments to let the stiffness of the abrupt impact lessen. Levered herself up, and fished the book from inside her tunic.

Maybe since they were outside the magic boundaries of the vault…

Carefully, like balancing on the caldera rim, Mu cracked open the book and turned to the first page, agonizingly slow.

Nothing. Still blank.

Frowning, she flipped through all the rest of the pages. Blank, blank, blank! No voice, no hints, no dragon, it was just- just a book!

Mu’s heart sank as she worried at the edges of the open page. Knew I should have gone for the sword-sheath…

Sighing, she went to close the book and work on how to get out of here, but out of the corner of her eye-

Red. Red in handwriting she didn’t recognize, that hadn’t been there before.

“Hey, stop poking me, brat!”

The book almost dropped from her grasp, and Mu had to scramble to catch it and hold the no-longer-blank page to a critical eye. “You… are you a dragon?” she whispered.

“What do you think? I’m just a random human soul imprisoned in an object?” The book’s page-edges fluttered, rustling in a way that sounded reminiscent of maniacal cackling. “Hell, you might even be dumb enough to buy it, since you broke me out of the jail cell Tempus’s little pet humans put me in!”

If it was going to be this much of a jerk, Mu definitely regretted not going for the sword now. “Hey, you could stand to be more grateful! Aren’t you sick of being stuck in there?”

“Sick of being trapped in an inanimate, nerveless body in a dark room for centuries? Say it isn’t so!” Even just as words on a page, its tone dripped sarcasm. “I know how humans are about power, I wasn’t born last century. Nice job giving those blockheaded guys access to it too!”

… Surely the Mafia weren’t smart enough for that. She already knew they were just in it for the money. “What does it matter if I want power? Would you rather go back on your super cozy shelf?” Mu countered.

All its previous taunts vanished back into the page, the next lines appearing faster than the words before. “Hey now, let’s not be hasty. I’m sure there’s something you can give me in exchange for… whatever you want.”

“I want the Mafia off this island. For good. Whether driven away or dead, I don’t care.” The power to rend apart armies, like the Crusaders were legendary for. And Mu needed a little legend on her side, to single-handedly destroy the occupying force. “And what do you want, bookbrain?”

“What do you think I want? I want my body back, duh!”

Yeah, that’s about what she figured. Scooting back and settling against the rough stone wall, Mu propped the book open on her knees. “Kinda hard for you to rain fire on the Mafia without it,” she commented casually. “And I think showing up on a dragon’s back will scare the piss out of them, for sure!”

Mu’s whimsical daydreams of flying through the sky and blasting retreating Mafia ships from the ocean were, unfortunately, squashed. “You are absolutely not going to ride me like some common steed. Back-rides are for young drachlings, not human teenagers with illusions of grandeur.” The text curled out slower, somehow more formal than its rapid scrawls from before. “Setting a bunch of blockheads on fire? Now that, I can do.”

“So, let’s deal, hm?” Rapidly, lines and columns were inked down the book, with ‘The Soul-Snatcher’ in lurid red on the left, and ‘Human Girl’ on the right.

Under ‘The Soul-Snatcher’, the list was deceptively simple. He wanted to be returned to his body, off the island, alive. Under ‘Human Girl’, it detailed driving off the Mafia, setting alight the ones that refused to leave, and leaving the dragon free to roam off as he pleases.

“Just make sure not to hurt any of the actual islanders.” Not that it should be hard for the dragon to pick out the invaders among the native residents. Mafia were pretty distinct that way, even if they did look weirdly identical to each other. “Also, I have a name, you know. It’s Muriel. What’s yours?”

“That’s none of your business. You have my title, so take it or leave it.” The words were bold and blocky, like heavy brush-strokes. “So, do we have a deal or not?”

Mu rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, this is how I thought it would go anyways. Now do I like… sign it, or something?”

Paper scuffed against paper in a scoff. “Of course not. This is a blood-pact, duh.”

“Like what Tempus did with the Crusaders?”

“Ugh, yes, and I still can’t believe she pulled that off, I can almost respect the audacity.” Blood-red lines mapped out a crude trail from a book, to a human stick-figure, to a lump with wings that might have been a dragon, if Mu squinted and tilted her head. “But you will serve as a living intermediary- I can’t just go from the book to my body- if I’m stuck in a dead body, neither of us gets what we want. So I’ll just hop from here, to my blood in living flesh- that’s you- to my body, do some housecleaning, and we’re golden!”

Mu wasn’t really sure she wanted to know what ‘housecleaning’ entailed in a centuries-dead dragon carcass. And given what she’d read about Tempus and her Crusaders, she expected the blood pact. But… “Yeah, except where the hell are we gonna get dragonblood? Your corpse is- Saints knows how many miles away!”

“And what do you think this is? Ink?” The rust-dark words glared at her accusingly.

Oh, that was… a little disturbing. “So, um. What does a blood-pact like… do to people?”

A wrinkle of pages, like a shrug. “Stronger magic, for one. Your affinity for Fire magic is going to increase exponentially, though you’ll still have to learn the actual spells yourself. If you have any descendants, they’ll inherit a diluted effect too.”

That also matched up with what accounts she could find of the Crusaders, and what they could do; Mu was certain to do her research before actually grabbing a dragon-soul. And whatever pact-spell she got out of it would be more than enough insurance if Snatcher turned on her. “Okay, fine. So… is there like… a spell, or?”

“Just hold your hand to my bottom corner.” Obligingly, Mu did, cupping her hand by the smooth edges of paper.

Snatcher’s words slithered down to the page-corner, and deep red welled along the paper edges like a cut on skin. Morbidly curious, Mu watched as drops of blood stained her cupped palm red.

Eventually, the blood-drip stopped, and Snatcher’s words reappeared on the page, if a bit fainter than before. “Now drink it.”

Instinctively, Mu wrinkled her nose in disgust. Cautiously sniffed at the thimble’s-worth of blood in her hand. It didn’t smell like dead blood, at least.

Bottoms up, Mu thought grimly, tilting her head back as she brought her hand to her lips.

It… tasted like blood. Like when her nose got broken after a Mafia caught her stealing his coinpurse; a coppery tang sliding down her throat and settling uneasily in her stomach. Her gut roiled and clenched, because if Tempus’s blood was given to humanity’s greatest champions, Mu didn’t want to know what the other side’s blood would say about her.

But instead of vocalizing her doubts and ill thoughts about what it meant to ally with one of humanity’s oldest enemies, Mu simply stuck her tongue out, muttering “Blech, that’s gross.”

“Duh, it’s blood. Now let’s get out of this pit!”

Now that was a sentiment Mu could get behind. “Oooh, the pact-spell? I bet I could melt the entire gaol around the Mafia’s ears!”

“Uh, no. No dragonblood spell until we find my body.”

“What? That’s not fair!”

“Oh, it’s plenty fair! There’d be nothing stopping you from just destroying me with it and taking on the Mafia yourself! I’m not stupid!”

“Hey! I should be more worried about you breaking the deal, in case you forgot how it ended for the dragons the last time they were on the continent-!”

Bang.

Mu scrambled to her feet, back to the wall, and stuffed the book back into her tunic before the scowling Mafia could notice it. “Mafia hear yelling! Who is little hooded girl arguing with that is disturbing Mafia’s beauty sleep?”

He still had the key, Mu knew. And if there was one thing she’d learned since the invasion, it was how to piss Mafia goons off.

Mu grinned; more a snarl than a smile, aware that there was probably still dragon blood staining her teeth. “Your mother, you fish-for-brains bastard.”

Oh, that was the angriest she’d seen one of the goons get in a while. His fists rattled the iron bars hard enough that they scraped harshly against stone. “How dare bring Mafia’s mother into this! She is good lady, with whole ship under command!” A meaty fist banged against the cell door in frustration, metallic clanging echoing through the gaol.

Mu flinched back at the sound, heart hammering, but instead of backing up, she marched towards the man looming behind the bars, magic-tinted sparks trailing in an unnatural circle around her hand. She knew how to do this, technically. Hopefully Snatcher was right about the Fire magic thing.

The Mafia barely had time to back away before the bright pillar of Elfire swallowed him like a whale did krill.

Mu dropped to her hands and knees as she shoved her arm through the cell bars, holding the neck of her cloak up to her nose and trying not to gag. She found the key easily enough, but not before singing her fingers on the hot metal and the- the still-cooling body. Don’t think about it.

It took some fiddling, but soon the door was unlocked, and Mu shoved it open, wincing as the limp Mafia was pushed to the side and made a really gross ash-crinkle sound. Mu flexed her hand briefly, familiar with the faint tingling pricks that accompanied an inexperienced Fire caster, but also…

She didn’t feel any different. On the rare occasion she got to practice the more advanced spell, usually she needed to have High Sage Maradoth or Luka supervising, and it left her heat-achy and exhausted for hours; it was normal for a kid her age to feel that way after throwing around strong magic.

But now she felt… fine. Better than she did even after casting a simple Fire in the vault.

Mu clenched her fist shut, marching towards the gaol’s exit with new purpose.

She had a dragon’s corpse to find, and then an occupation to end.

Chapter Text

“Any truly organized group of dragons taking to the field is a threat to the unprepared, but perhaps the most dangerous combatants in the Crusaders’ War were the Silent Dragons.

Adept at movement both in the air and in the water, Silent Dragons made their homes in the warmer southern seas, nesting in deep trenches and surfacing after the hatchling season was over. As more and more Silent Dragons joined the forces under Tacitus the Immovable, the Omnecian navy was faced with a choice- adapt or die.

Their old strategies based on boarding enemy vessels and slaying their soldiers were rendered moot in the face of galley-sized foes that could break the ships from below at their leisure. So the focus shifted.

Both ballistics and naval maneuvers improved rapidly, with even the smallest of ships soon outfitted with the strongest cannons and explosive cannonballs, loaded with blasting powder. Rather than charge against a dragon that may submerge as it wished, smaller skippers were designed to lure Silent Dragons into the circle of larger galleys, who could then bombard the dragon as it attempted to snap the skippers between its jaws.

After allying with the Pelan Isle, it was common for each ship to have at least one Sage stationed upon it; those who attained mastery over Thunder magic were especially valued, as just one human who could cast Thoron multiple times in a short period of time could be devastating to the water-dwelling Silent Dragons.

Even today, long after such necessities are obsolete, most navy-registered ships, from Omnoc to the Metro to the Mafia of Cooks, enlist a mage onto their crew. It is considered good luck, as well as strategically advantageous.”

-Toppling the Titan: Evolution of Military Strategy in the Face of Dragons

--

It turned out where there was one Mafia, there were usually at least five more.

So after her second heart-pounding encounter in the gaol’s halls, Mu decided to say ‘screw this’, and started setting everything on fire.

And it was freeing, in a way that revealed how trapped she felt before. No hiding behind the adults, no creeping around as just a hide-behind thief stealing money from Mafia goons, no limits! She was just barely starting to feel the drain, after flinging Elfire around like a seasoned mage-knight rather than a teenage girl!

Most of the gaol was made of stone, true. But there was more than enough wood for her to do some serious damage.

Mu finally stumbled out from the smoke, hot cinders swirling behind her steps. Looked behind her.

The entire gaol was on fire, the kind of uncontrolled blaze usually associated with idiots with access to lava and the expected catastrophic results. Mafia goons swirled in a throng that was easy to merge into, as they either panicked by running away from the fire or panicked by running toward it in an attempt to extinguish it.

Hoping the fire didn’t spread to any houses, Mu faded into the alley-shadows and sprinted to the convent- it wasn’t far from the barracks and gaol, after all. She still had time to pick up her supplies.

As she wove through the night-darkened backstreets, Mu realized she’d have to find a way to get off the island- Snacher’s body wasn’t here, after all.

She’d… handle that after she got her stuff. Yeah.

The convent was unsettlingly silent at this hour, with each of Mu’s footsteps echoing and the door creaking as she pushed into her room. Swiftly she double-checked her pack to make sure everything was there before shoving Snatcher into it, drawing the strings closed and hauling it over her back.

The hall was slightly less empty as she made her escape.

Dark robes swirling at his feet, Luka turned a corner in front of Mu, brown hair mussed and throat purpled with visible bruises, even in the darkness. “Muriel, what are you-?” He cut himself off, eyes darting from her soot-stained hair, and packed bag, and finally out to the gaol; even from this distance, it burned bright enough to shade his eyes gold in the reflected light. “... Did you...?”

“Um,” Mu said helplessly, because this really wasn’t looking great from her end-

“They’re not going to let you get away with it this time…” A whisper, so quiet even a breeze would have carried it away. Suddenly, as if struck, Luka dove his hands beneath his outer robes, retrieving a stack of coins. With one shaking hand- his fingers always had a fine tremble to them, but there was something heavier in their shivering now- he shoved the gold at her, and with the other, he grasped at her shoulder, firm and determined. “Go down to the east docks, look for the S.S. Unsinkable- the captain is a big guy in a leather coat, has a bushy mustache and walrus-tusk pipe. Tell him I sent you.”

She was leaving. Mu really was leaving, and the true weight of it felt less like justice and purpose, and a little more like fear, and the unknown.

She dislodged Luka’s grip on her as she crashed into him, hands fisting on the back of his robes as she buried her face into the sandy smell of fabric exposed to vast amounts of Dark Magic.

“Listen, Muriel,” Luka commanded, breath tickling Mu’s hair. “It doesn’t matter what you must do to stay as such- but keep yourself safe. I’ll find you when it’s safe here.”

He whirled her around by the shoulder, gently shoving her away to the door, but… “Wait,” Mu cut across him, refusing to move. “What about you?”

Luka smiled- a grim thing, with an edge of teeth. “I’ll be fine. The Mafia... got something they wanted, after all. Now go.” He pushed her away, more insistently. “Get to the captain. Run if you have to. And don’t look back.”

Halfway down the stairs that trailed down the caldera rim like vines, Mu did look back.

The sand-colored stone perched on the slope was bright against the dark mountain, windows dim and lanterns extinguished. Hibernating, hollow, still in mourning for what it used to be.

She wasn’t sure if the dark smudge in one of those windows was Luka. She kind of hoped it was. It was… nice, that he cared enough to watch.

Mu turned away, taking the steps two at a time, eyes fixed on the ship-lights dotting the shore like stars.

Blessedly, nobody paid much attention to a random kid running through the streets- not that there were many people out at this hour, ever since the Mafia made themselves at home.

Once her boots hit the salt-stained wood of the eastern docks, Mu stopped, heaving in exhausted gulps of night air. As she caught her breath, she skimmed her eyes along the ships, squinting against the dark and the swaying light from prow-hung lamps.

Soon, she found it. The Unsinkable. Although Mu was fairly doubtful about the accuracy of that name, given even at this hour she could see the patches in the hull. Still, she slunk up the ramp to the front cabin, wary of being seen still.

Hesitantly, she knocked on the cabin door. She waited, and for a moment she considered leaving and finding another way off the island… somehow. But just as she shifted back to consider her options, the door swung open, lamplight from the cabin beaming from behind the silhouette of the largest man she’d ever seen.

“What’re you doing here, missy? It’s past midnight,” he mumbled around an unlit, bone-white pipe.

Mu decided not to point out the fact that he’d also been awake at this heinous hour. “I’m here for passage off the island. Uh… Luka sent me.”

“Sent me a charity case just because I helped one exile. Figures,” the captain muttered.

Charity case… Oh! Wordlessly, Mu dug around her pockets, offering the handful of coins Luka sent her off with. “Not a charity case, Captain. At least as long as you can get me off this island now.” She tried not to glance back at the still-burning gaol, which was visible even from the island’s shore.

The captain scrutinized her. Sighed, and waved her aside, tromping down the stairs to belowdecks. “Saints curse me and my soft heart.” His grumbling escalated into a booming call the moment he disappeared beneath the deck. “Rise and shine, crew! We have winds to catch!”

Thumps, and a sudden swell of chattering that was way too excited about being woken up at such an hour.

Wisely, Mu stepped away from the stairs as a tiny swarm of short, stocky sailors stomped up the steps and spread across the deck, some of them scrambling up the rigging with a dexterity that spoke of years of long practice.

“Captain! Whewe are we gowing?”

… Okay, the… accent? Would take some getting used to, though.

“Where do you think? Nearest port! Western coast of Cook territory!”

As the ship pulled away from the dark harbor, Mu’s gut tugged at her. She’d never left home before, ever.

She’d be back though. She swore it.

--

“Yeeek!”

“Oh, I- I didn’t mean to startle you, little human.”

“You’re- my reflection-”

“You are not losing your mind, I assure you. My ways of speaking are simply… limited, is all.”

“Oh, I- I’m sorry for disturbing your slumber, I’ll take my leave, if you wish.”

“No! Please, I… it has been so lonely here, all these centuries. It would do my heart well, to speak to another after so long.”

“I would be honored. Truth be told, I was… I came here hoping to speak to a dragon. Someone who remembers how things used to be.”

“It would be my pleasure to indulge such curiosity- it is a precious, rare thing for a human to understand our perspective.”

“Oh, thank you! But first, what is your name, Sar Dragon?”

“I am known as the Storm-Catcher. Tell me, who am I speaking to?”

“... Paracos. You may call me Paracos.”

Chapter Text

“There are many tales of dragons making blood-pacts with humans- more widespread in draconic culture than human culture, as our memories span back further than humans can think of. Such events are rare, after all, and as such are remembered. These stories may be considered either a dire warning against such alliances or a reason to forge them, depending on the reader.

Anankos the Forgotten seemingly only existed in the mind of the human he shared his blood with, who claimed to have been adopted into the Silent clan by the dragon that lived on the coast of his home. This human, Cadros, claimed Anankos vanished into the deepest trenches of the world, knowing that as the degeneration rotted through his mind, he would likely destroy all that he loved. And Anankos and Cadros loved each other, deeply.

Mila the Earth-Mother and Duma the War-Father were the heirs of the Divine clan, and their mother forbade them from fighting for the position as heir. Instead, they each gave their blood to a human, and in the name of that alliance, the humans fought in their stead. However, the siblings underestimated the power they had afforded to the humans- Duma was slain by Mila’s pact-holder, as Mila was slain by Duma’s pact-holder.

Loptyr the Vehement forged a blood-pact with a human just as cruel as they, and the pair ruled through that human’s bloodline for ten generations of bloodshed. They were not defeated- simply vanished. Where they disappeared to, none know, and all pray that they never return.

Tempus the Incandescent chose to view these stories not as a warning, but as a path to victory. She bestowed her blood and her magic, Narga, to not one, but twelve humans. Her Crusaders bore great loyalty to their patron, even carrying the standard with her mark wherever their armies stepped foot. But I am certain that if Tempus ever proved to hold thoughts of betrayal towards humanity, her Crusaders would have struck her down with her own pact-spell. They are, after all, loyal to their own people, moreso than even the dragon clans' leaders are to their clanmates. Humans are such maddeningly, beautifully social creatures.

I wonder if perhaps, as the war dwindles to ashes around me, it is better for these stories to be forgotten. For dragons and humans to remain ever-apart. If connecting with a human means that same human would eventually become more powerful than I? If it meant I would be trapped inside with a foreign spirit? I would refuse to ever forge a blood-pact with one. It is far too dangerous, for all involved.”

-Ilah the Judge

--

Mu let her legs dangle free over the side of the ship, face mushed between the rails.

She didn’t get seasick- no self-respecting islander did. But Saints above, she was bored.

… Maybe it was a sign to stop putting off the inevitable. Mu rummaged through her sack and pulled out Snatcher, falling down to rest on her back and keeping a half-eye on the crew. They were far enough away that they shouldn’t hear her seemingly whispering to herself.

The moment she cracked open the book, lurid red sprawled across the page. “Oh, now you decide to open me, huh. I thought you had an actual plan to get to Omnoc!”

“Hey, things went a little sideways, but I made it work. You should be grateful we’re off the island at all!” Mu rolled her eyes. “And you never told me exactly where your body is, anyway.”

There was no response, for long enough that the empty pages were beginning to look suspicious. “You do know where it is, yes?” Mu asked testily.

“Yes, of course I do!” Then, in much smaller letters. “Roughly.”

“Show me.”

Almost begrudgingly, a map of the continent inked itself out. After offering a few corrections- the Omnecian Empire no longer took up the entire continent, as the Metropolitan Mercantile Republic and the Mafia of Cooks split off to the south two hundred years ago, and had been fighting over territory ever since. In faded pink, Snatcher highlighted their possible destination.

“You have to be joking!” Mu kept her voice to a whisper. Barely. “That’s the entire coast of northern Omnoc! Hundreds of miles! You can’t seriously be telling me you don’t remember where you died!”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, human, but which of us was stuck in a spirits-damned oubliette for hundreds of years?”

Mu scrunched up her brow in confusion, because that was a word she’d never seen before. “A what?”

“... Don’t worry about it. Point is, it will be a lot easier to pinpoint where my body is once we reach the area, so don’t get your spines bent out of shape about it.”

“Yeah, you say that when you’re not the one that has to hike across the entire continent. I didn’t pack for a season-long journey!”

Snatcher’s pages shushed against each other. “Come on, I saw the different coin purses at the bottom of your bag; you even walk like a thief. It shouldn’t be hard for you to acquire what you need while we travel.”

Mu sat up abruptly, the accusation burning her inside. “I don’t steal from- from innocent people! Just the Mafia!”

“Oh, please, you stole me.”

“That’s different,” Mu said, feeling like she was pointing out the obvious. “You can’t steal a person.”

The paper in her hands remained a stunned white. And then Mu remembered something she probably should've asked beforehand. “So, uh. If we’re going to be traveling together, are you- like, are you a guy, or a girl, or something else?”

Saint Patience have mercy on her, but this was awkward; but her teachers had always drummed it into her head that it was only polite to ask for pronouns if you weren’t sure. Normally she didn’t have to, because clothes or hairstyle made it easy for people to present what they were on the island; when Mu was younger she started wearing her hair in the girl’s style, changed her name, and that was that. But Snatcher was both a book and a dragon, so who knew how it worked for them.

“Male, duh.”

“Oh, don’t be sarcastic with me,” Mu snorted. “Whether or not you’re a dragon or a book, it’s not like it’d be obvious.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know I’m the picture of masculinity! Maybe humans are damn weird, but you at least did good on the gender thing.”

Huh, Mu never really thought about gender as just… a purely human creation. Living without such an inextricable part of oneself seemed so alien to her. “Well, on behalf of my species, you’re welcome for inventing gender,” she said, sarcasm sharp in her voice. “Now bring up the map again, I want to plot our land-route.”

“Ugh, you’re a demanding one.” But the map reappeared on his pages anyway. “Why are you insisting on taking a land route anyway? Wouldn’t it be easier to just swing up north and hit Omnoc’s southern coast by sea?”

“Yeah, sure, if you’re a fan of running into their navy,” Mu snorted. “Because I can tell you that the ships sitting at the bottom of the ocean were not fans.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope!” Mu declared, allowing herself to feel a bit smug despite everything. “Omnoc’s been having issues with smuggling- blood-magic-marked stuff is apparently in hot demand these days, and everyone at home knows it, since we’re a port town. A few seasons ago the Queen must have gotten sick of it, because she started actually enforcing all the borders, land and sea.” Mu swept her finger across the narrowest part of the continent, marveling at how the red blood-ink drew a line in her wake. “So that’s why we’ll need to cross the border here- the Gates of Paracos.”

“That’s a lot of distance for a shrimp like you to cover,” Snatcher remarked, his words tracing the path from their destination, Codport, to the Gates.

Urgh, Mu was not looking forward to that. “Still better than getting sunk out in the middle of the ocean for smuggling, because need I remind you, you would probably count as blood-magic contraband, hm?”

“Ugh, don’t tell me humans running around with blood-magic is an actual problem here.”

“Nah, nobody actually knows how to do that stuff anymore. It’s not like the Crusaders bothered to write it down.”

“... Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

Mu didn’t have to wonder why he wanted it to remain that way.

--

A week of deeply boring sea travel could make even the blandest of port towns seem like the greatest of discoveries.

Mu couldn’t bring herself to feel any shame as she perched at the ship’s prow, eyes skimming over all the Cook-controlled Codport had to offer. It was a place of commerce, and it showed- stalls and tents creeping up past the docks like oilcloth barnacles, shouts and wave-slaps and wheel-rattles adding even more to the usual cacophony associated with a port town. Considering the Cooks’ clash with the Metro was just as much mercantile as it was military, Mu supposed the excess of economical goings-ons made sense.

The moment the Unsinkable’s ramp dropped, Mu was off like a shot, almost running into the Captain in her haste to leave. “Steady there, little charity case. The town ain’t going anywhere.”

Charity case- oh. She’d forgotten. Wordlessly, and only semi-reluctantly, Mu counted out the coins in her pocket with her fingers, presenting the captain with the exact amount Luka had given her. “Not a charity case, captain.”

To her surprise, he waved her off gruffly. “Keep it. If you’re anything like he was, you’re running from something dangerous. You’re gonna need it.” Beneath his bushy mustache, the pipe swept from one side of his mouth to the other. “Now, git. Saint Fortitude watch over you.”

Not one to waste, Mu stuffed the money back into her pocket and leapt off the ship- but not before sketching a fairly respectful bow towards the captain.

Pulling her hood over her head and hiking her bag-strap further up, Mu vanished into the rivers of busy humans swarming the docks.

First order or business: food, and lots of it. The cheaper and more travel-tough, the better. Once her bag was stuffed with wraps of salted fish and tough jerky and her collection of gold slightly diminished, Mu resigned herself to digging around the junky secondhand stall for a small pot and thick bedroll, just managing to stuff the pot into her bag and tie the bedroll to the bottom of it.

Bag as packed as it ever could be and Snatcher tucked into the sash around her tunic, Mu took her first steps northeast, out of the range of the port town.

Hours later, feet aching, she looked back. The town wasn’t visible. The ocean wasn’t visible, which was even scarier. Lonely, in a way that ached like the too-thin air from the caldera peak.

Mu turned back around. She kept walking.

--

The moment the sun’s rim touched the treeline, Mu stumbled off the thin, gravelly road, pushing through the sparse patches of cedar and oak to find a spot far enough from the road to feel safe camping for the night. As much as collapsing on a bedroll with a bag for a pillow and dried jerky for dinner could be called ‘camping’.

She could have afforded a tent. Maybe, if it was dirt cheap. But she had more important things to think about, like food, and the ability to boil her own water, because getting sick from the rivers was the last thing she wanted to deal with.

As she tore her way through the fish jerky, Mu set Snatcher on the bedroll, flipping him open to a random page. “So, do you have any idea how far we’ve gone?”

“If I could see from above, maybe. But you can’t exactly fly, can you?”

“So you have no idea. Super, thanks for the help,” Mu snorted. “I just want to stay away from towns unless we have to get food or other stuff- the Cooks and the Metro are always at each others’ throats, and the border changes so often I don’t know where we’d find the most fighting.”

“Wait, but- hold on, you said it would take you weeks to get to the Omnoc border on foot, and you’ve only been walking a day! How can the Metro border be so close?”

Mu shrugged, because she honestly had no idea how the Metropolitan units kept popping up in Cook territory. Only that they did. “I just know it fluctuates by, like, dozens of miles at a time; news about maritime trade gets to Pelan easy, sure. News about the Metro and Cooks’ pissing contest? Not so much.” She set aside the empty food-wrap and waterskin, flopping to her back on the bedroll and doing her best to find a spot in her bag-pillow that was mostly clothes instead of the metal pot. “Borders aside, I don’t think we’ll be getting lost anytime soon though. Stars are nice and clear, this far out.”

Mu was content to simply… stare, taking in the glory of the night-sprawl above them. Until the insistent rattling of paper on leather beside her head became too loud to ignore. “What now?” Mu questioned, opening Snatcher above her head.

“Show me the stars,” his text demanded, bolded and insistent. “I can see from my cover, but not as well as when I’m open.”

Mu opened her mouth to ask why… and then closed it, because she probably already knew. If she’d been stuck in a dark room for that long, seeing the stars would be nice for her, too.

Wordlessly, she flipped Snatcher around, holding him up so his pages faced the sky. She held him there for a few minutes before her arms started to burn, still protesting all the walking and hauling around she’d done during the day.

Gracelessly, Mu flopped over onto her stomach, laying Snatcher open on the ground before her and propping her chin on her fist. “So?”

“The stars… they’re the same.” The words flowed absentmindedly, like a meandering creek.

“Well, yeah. I’d imagine spring constellations are the same as they were during the Crusaders’ War.” Which was… humbling to think about, really. Navigating by the stars meant that they sometimes held your life in their hands, just as the ocean did. But that was somehow different than realizing she was looking at the same sky that the Crusaders did.

“I’m glad they are. Otherwise it would be an even bigger pain in the tail to get to Omnoc.” The now-familiar map swept across the paper. “It’s the seventh week of spring, and Grima’s Eyes are visible, so we should be about… here.” A tiny, crudely-drawn stick figure scribbled into existence a depressingly short distance from Codport.

Wait. “What the heck is a Grima Eye?”

“This,” Snatcher said, sketching out a series of dots and lines, his words holding an implied ‘Duh’ to them despite not having a voice to speak with. “Grima’s Eyes, y’know. Earth Dragon who was born with four more eyes than usual, and could see into the world of spirits.”

Mu leaned in closer, squinting at the red lines that were getting harder and harder to read as the sun continued to set. “Uh, no, I’m pretty sure that’s Saint Fortitude’s Shield.” The shape of the Shield was pretty similar to the lines Snatcher had used to connect the stars, actually. She wondered which had come first- shield or eyes.

“Hah! Maybe for humans it is! It’s all about the saints with you, nothing interesting at all!”

“It’s not all about the Saints!” Mu scoffed. “What about the Creator’s Spine?”

At Snatcher’s inked question mark, Mu clarified. “It’s not visible until autumn, at least back home. The stars are positioned like this,” she said, tapping parts of the paper and watching in curiosity as red dots welled up where she touched, as if she’d brushed the page with bleeding fingers. “And they connect like this- the spine and shoulders.” Red swept behind her finger, tracing along the eponymous spine of the Creator.

“Huh, that’s… strangely like ours. Except we call it The Fell.”

Glancing up at the dusk-darkened sky, Mu made a decision. She lit a fire in her hand- a continuously-burning miniature Fire spell that used to take way more concentration to pull off before the dragon blood. “So, what’s the story behind that one, for dragons?”

As Snatcher filled his pages, Mu found herself enjoying the stories he told- even if the accompanying illustrations were illegible, there was obvious passion behind them.

Maybe Snatcher was an alright guy, for a dragon, if just seeing some stars had him acting like less of an ass.

She almost found herself forgetting he wasn’t human. That he warred with humans. Mu wasn’t quite sure if that was a bad thing or not, yet.

Chapter Text

“Fire- Piss-easy basic spell. I could do it in my sleep! Can’t really do much damage so I’m not sure why the teacher is even bothering mentioning it. It’s not like it’ll be on the written test.

Elfire- Definitely the most common Anima spell for trained mages. It’s harder to cast than Wind-series spells, but way easier to aim. Similarly, though it’s not as powerful as Thunder-series spells, it takes a lot less energy, so it can be cast more often.

Arcfire- The most powerful of the basic Fire-series spells. As a steady stream of fire in a direct line from the caster, it’s most effective from frontline mages. Which always poses a dilemma for troop organization, because it takes a very well-trained mage to reliably cast Arcfire, and training takes time.

Bolganone- Highest level of Fire-series magic. Usually it’s something only fully-trained Sages can actually cast without knocking themselves out, but in the battlefield it’s more likely to be utilized by Mage Knights and the rarer Master Knights- if Arcfire is like a Fire Dragon’s breath, then Bolganone is like dropping a barrel of blasting powder into a fire. Not something you want to be near once it goes off!

Meteor- Siege magic. Like its sister-spell Bolting, it has a ridiculously long range, long enough to hit the back-lines of an army from a distance. Due to the amount of energy needed to propel a spell that far, it’s agreed upon to be the hardest spell in the Fire series. Those who can cast it are often relegated to the rear of any given formation, and are jealously protected.”

-Scribbled notes on parchment, from a student attending Nadir School of Magic.

--

On most days, Muriel woke with the sun- dust-specked beams of light streaming through her window, or the uncomfortable warmth waking her up during the summer months.

On the continent, Mu did not wake up with the sun.

At first she ignored the insistent slams of, well, a book opening and closing with frankly excessive force. Turned around and faced away from it.

Snatcher just started slamming his covers louder. Bastard.

Finally, Mu rolled around, tearing open the book to snarl “What?”

“Rise and shine, kid! We only got a half-day of travel yesterday, and we’re wasting daylight!”

“What ‘we’? I was doing all the walking!”

“Oh, sorry, I’ll just stand up and walk on my legs!” As if to emphasize his point, the map of the continent faded back into existence below his words, with at least ten completely unnecessary arrows pointing to the northern coast. “Oh wait, that’s right, my legs are attached to my body, which is in Omnoc! My bad!”

Mu glared at him mutinously; she was annoyed enough to briefly consider using bits of him as campfire kindling, but mostly she was just tired.

Ignoring the way the leather cover bucked under her grip, Mu shoved Snatcher under the bag that she used as a pillow, and collapsed back on top of it.

--

Later, after the campsite was nothing but a distant memory behind her, Mu admitted to herself that she probably should have started walking earlier in the day. And she just as easily could have, but sleeping in despite Snatcher’s insistence was more about proving a point.

Speaking of the dragon, though… Mu started thinking about Anima magic, and, in the endlessly boring expanse of road stretching infinitely in front of her, couldn’t stop thinking about magic. Snatcher hadn’t been lying about the effects of the blood-pact, considering she could cast Elfire and hardly notice the difference, as opposed to her past attempts that ended in her panting on the ground and wondering where all the pretty lights came from.

But that was just a low-level spell in the grand scheme of things. How far did her affinity for Fire magic go, though?

Without breaking her stride, Mu pulled Snatcher out of her sash, flipping him open and tapping his paper after a few moments of staring at his blank pages. “Hey, Snatcher, wake up.”

“I can’t sleep, you know,” he pointed out, “But I’ll have you know I was thinking some very important thoughts before you interrupted me so rudely.”

Mu rolled her eyes, and made sure the book was open in a position so he could see her scoff. “Yeah, I’m sure they were super important. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. We’ve got nothing to do but stare at the road and walk, so while we’re doing that, teach me magic.”

“I told you, I’m not teaching you the pact-spell-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Mu cut him off. “I mean, like. Normal magic. I only know Elfire and Fire. Don’t you have like, I don’t know, fragments of other spells? Surely you remembered something from the Crusaders’ War.”

“Fragments? Oh please, I can do way better than that.” Snatcher’s pages bloomed with a dizzying array of circles and formulas that should have made Mu go cross-eyed, if not for the fact that interpreting them felt like reading her own native language. It was weird. “What do you think of that, huh?”

It was detailed. Scarily so- even though she’d only seen the theory behind these spells just now, Mu knew, down to her bones and the foreign blood in her system, that each diagram was perfectly exact. Which was even stranger, because dragons couldn’t use constructed spells, not like humans could. “How do you even know all of this? I thought dragons couldn’t use human magic!”

“Of course we can’t.” Snatcher’s words canted oddly around the still-present diagrams and rune-circles. “What, you think everything we knew about humans was from the battlefield? Wow, that’s narrow-minded of you!”

Mu squinted in disbelief. “Uh-huh, sure, and why exactly would a dragon bother learning something they can’t use?”

The spells vanished from the page, replaced with the haughty script of a nobleman. “I’ll have you know I was a scholar of great repute! A lawkeeper! Even the chief of the Ice clan consulted me on matters of judgement.”

The emphasis behind ‘judgement’ and ‘lawkeeper’ had to mean something, but… “You- if you’re stuck in here, though, that means you got killed in the war! You’re telling me the dragons sent their scholars to battle too?”

Paper-faded silence. Snatcher’s next words appeared… stilted. Stiff, as if written in a clipped rush that he couldn’t stop from spilling over. “Not often. I only fought a few times near the end. But we lost, kid. Do the math yourself.”

Despite the fact that Tacitus’s intention of erasing humanity from the continent was well-reported, Mu couldn’t help but wince. Yeah, she understood noncombatants being forced to fight. After the Mafia first appeared on the shoreline, bristling with cannons and armed men, she understood it very well. “Did you… did you even want to fight?”

“... No,” Snatcher wrote finally, his script the faded and bitter pink of blood seeping through bandage-layers. “I had better things to do than fight. But I shed blood for them anyway, literally, and look where it got me.”

… Yeah, Mu could see why that was a touchy subject. “At least after getting rid of the Mafia back home, you won’t have to worry about that again? Since nobody knows how to do blood-magic anymore.”

“Heh, you have a point there, kid. It’s way easier to get things done without active war hanging over our heads.” The script had an insistent nudge to it, seeming to prod at her fingertips. “Also with, y’know, an actual body.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ll get there eventually-” Wait. “... Actually. I don’t even know what a Fire Dragon looks like. How will I know what to look for?”

Like sharp brush-strokes, red flowed across paper, encompassing the entire page in one long image, wings flared and ink smudged to look like smoke-

Mu had to clutch the book to herself to keep herself from dropping it as she doubled over, wheezing with laughter. “It looks like you glued a sea urchin onto an iguana’s head!”

Snatcher rattled angrily in her grip like a box of cliff-wasps, and Mu managed to crack him open to read through her tears of laughter. “I do not! I’m- stop laughing!”

It occurred to Mu, distantly, that this was the first time she’d really laughed in… a long time. Not the satisfied, grim snickers from her successful escapes from the Mafia. Just… fun, the graceless kind of joy she’d forgotten.

Maybe crossing the entire continent wouldn’t be as lonely as she thought.

--

It took eight full days to find another group of travelers heading the same direction they were- a full caravan of merchants and traders, clustered together seeking safety in numbers as they crossed the border from Cook lands to Metropolitan ones. Faster than on foot, and safer. This caravan sought the promise of gold at Metro Port, the gleaming crown of commerce in the south.

Mu, of course, cared little for that, but the caravan would be passing by the Gates of Paracos. They would also be passing the border between Metro and Cook territories, and no sane traveler ventured that alone.

Mu wasn’t quite sure if the merchant family she ended up sharing a wagon with took pity on her, or wanted something out of her. She wasn’t sure which she’d prefer. And while the relief from her aching feet and shelter from the rain they passed beneath was a blessing, traveling with others meant she couldn’t exactly pull Snatcher out for magic lessons, or just a conversation, for over a week.

Mu had gotten so used to just asking a question and watching his words explode across the paper, his memory clearly sharpening after centuries of isolation ground it down to dust. Apparently there were a lot of laws dragons held themselves to, from territory rights to hatchlings to alliances across different species, with lawkeepers to preside over any judgements a dragon clan’s council made. And Snatcher knew all of them, because as much as he insisted otherwise, he was an enormous nerd. Those conversations weren’t as interesting as the ones about magic or wars so old they predated the Crusaders, but still much more entertaining, more bond-fostering, than walking in silence; like the ship-bonds sailors made on their first ocean crossing, but over land instead of over sea.

Mu… missed it. Missed the afternoon fire-tales he spun, the history and laws and legends dragons abided by. And she was pretty sure Snatcher did too, given the seven-century isolation. Also given that every time she cracked him open his words spilled in a dizzying wave of red she barely had time to even look at before she had to close him again.

(She asked him about that, later. Apparently Snatcher didn’t have as much control over what appeared on his pages as Mu thought, since he didn’t have the intermediary of a physical body. There was nothing between his soul and his words but his own blood.)

Even still, there were risks associated with travelling with such a large caravan, alongside the benefits. For one, a large, and armed, wagon-train made for a target that would extract its price in blood. But it also made for a more visible target.

When the wagon of the family she’d been hitching a ride with shuddered to a halt, Mu took the opportunity to stick her head through the rain-treated canvas flaps dividing the actual wagon from the driver’s seat. “Are we making camp already?”

“Oh, I… don’t know, actually.” The merchant woman at the seat squinted at her from above. “You know what? Why don’t you pull your weight a little bit more, head up and check with the caravan head about whatever this hold-up is.”

Mu rolled her eyes but did as she was bid, tumbling out of the wagon and jogging to the head of the line.

As she passed the stalled wagons Mu noted, uncomfortably, that this was a very good place for an ambush. Cedar-scrub lined the beaten path on both sides, and the road swerved into a sharp, blind turn, preventing anything that ran on wheels from crashing through the brush to escape.

Her suspicions were not assuaged by the caravan-hired mercenary members heading in exactly the same direction she was, hands on sword-pommels or gripping spears. Mu tightened her sash, ensuring Snatcher stayed put.

Once the caravan head swung into sight, Mu stopped in her tracks.

She knew that they were in the territory of the Mafia of Cooks. Didn’t change the fact that seeing those patterns of blue-pinned clothes made heart stutter and adrenaline stream to her blood.

Carefully, she sidled up beside the pair of closest eavesdroppers.

“They can’t seriously expect us to pay the toll! It’s exorbitant! Practically highway robbery!” the merchant’s son hissed, getting more and more agitated as his father’s argument with the Mafia raised in pitch.

The mercenary beside him snorted, unimpressed. “Of course it’s robbery. The toll is just a pretense. See those guys in the back of the group?” Mu couldn’t help but follow their gesture as they pointed to a few people who were very obviously different from the rest of the goons- better armed and armored, and one wearing flowing robes in the Cooks’ standard blue. “Those three have to be the actual leaders. I’d bet my blade’s weight in gold that they have actual authority from the Mafia of Cooks’ Boss, too.”

“Wait, Sar Cato, you can’t surely intend to just sit here and watch, we paid you to-”

“Easy there, short stuff. I’m still hoping they back off without a fight. No need to invite blood where you can just as easily skate on by.”

A scoff. “And do you really think they will? With their toll on the line?”

“‘Course not. Worth a shot though.” Cato settled their hand on the pommel of their sword- a casual, deadly gesture. “Heads up. Here comes one of the big guys.”

Wisely, Mu slid behind Cato as the lance-wielding Mafia grunt paced over to the wagon they were huddled by. “Merchant man not pay toll in gold, so he pay in supplies. Move out of Mafia’s way.”

Cato’s head canted the side- a somehow predatory motion that made Mu grab for the book tucked in her sash and call sparks to her fingers. “Oh, are you?”

Behind the Mafia goon, the caravan leader shook his head, deliberately maintaining eye contact.

“Sorry, Sir Cook-Knight. I had an agreement with them already.” Cato shrugged. And with that same shrugging motion, drew their sword. Their first stroke took the Mafia’s lance.

The next stroke took his head.

Screams and bellows and blood flying like wildfire-sparks, as the tense toll-robbery exploded into a true fight. Mu lunged for the cover of the wagon, only to be shoved aside by someone else- Mafia, or fleeing merchant, or mercenary, she had no idea.

Heart pounding so hard she may as well be choking on it, Mu crabwalked away from the looming silhouettes of the combatants around her, numb to the gravel that bit into her stinging hands.

She rolled, coming to a halt beneath the shelter of a wagon’s carriage and panting breathlessly over the sound of screams and grunts and clashing iron.

Fists clenched on the road, she made a decision.

Mindful of stamping hooves from panicked horses and the clusters of booted feet that revealed where the Mafia and her travel companions were fighting, Mu squirmed to the front of the carriage, scrambling up the ladder to the driver’s seat.

If you can’t fly, always take the highest ground.

It didn’t give her more than a few feet over the fighters’ heads, but it was enough. Any Mafia-allied fighters within her range found themselves engulfed in flames, one at a time. Streaming the magic from mind to body to flame filled her breath with pride, and was deceptively easy- an almost gentle tug on her energy, whereas before, the struggle to keep runic equations fixed in her mind long enough for the magic to yank the breath out of her for even just one spell was like attempting to handle barbed fishing hooks in her bare hands without getting poked. Now? She forgot nothing of the spells, all of them perfectly aligned in mind and blood. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

A downside to taking the high ground, however, was that the teenage girl in bright Pelan garb made for a very visible target.

“Get the mage!” screamed out from somewhere, and Mu barely had the time to duck before a Wind spell cut over her head, clipping a few strands of blonde hair.

And after the magic, came the very angry, slightly-singed Armored Knight. The wagon groaned under his weight as he climbed, lance jabbing right where Mu would have been if she hadn't scrambled back and practically fallen off the wagon, air forced from her lungs as her back struck stone.

Stunned as a rock-beaten fish, Mu wheezed for breath as she scrabbled upright, crawling away from the advancing party- the armored leader, the mage leader, the Mafia goons. In front of her, to her left, and to her right. Bristling, clustered cedar-brush behind her, like the woven barriers around the caldera terraces, and just as thick.

Curling wind-runes echoed the mage’s movements, promising a spell that wouldn’t miss this time, and-

Mu, to her later shame, froze, mind cracked with the same frantic panic as a candle in the hurricane-

Bloodied fletching sprouted from the Mafia-mage’s neck, and as they fell to their knees, Mu grabbed at every tangled prayer and scrap of memory from the late-night magic lessons with Snatcher.

“You’re as close to fire-magic-proof as a human can get, but you’re not invincible.”

Even with that warning echoing, Mu aimed the spell just in front of her, on the ground.

Bolganone, true to all the descriptions she’d read, was explosive, erupting like a blasting powder keg in all directions, air sucked down in a howling gale to feed the fire.

As the fire-scream faded, and the flames died, Mu sucked in a breath of air even hotter than the worst of the island’s summer days- and promptly gagged, the smell of flesh seared down to bone sliding down her throat.

Head pounding and senses spinning like the smoke off the battlefield, Mu scrambled to her feet. Staggered through the ashes with her cloak collar drawn around her nose, scent pooling in her gut and leaving her feeling like she’d eaten rotten oysters.

Something hot crumble-squished underneath her foot, and after looking down past her impromptu mask, Mu skipped aside, and managed to reach the nearest wagon just in time to lean against it and lose her breakfast.

A voice, distant-sounding despite the owner’s closeness, cut through Mu’s haze as she attempted to get her rebelling stomach under control. “Didn’t know we were carting around a Sage with us.”

Mu spat, shakily wiping her mouth across her sleeve. “Not a Sage,” she muttered, looking Cato in the eye resolutely.

A raised eyebrow told Mu exactly what Cato thought of that statement. “I’ve seen more battles than you’ve seen seasons, you think I don’t know what Bolganone looks like?” They frowned in the direction of the- of the bodies. “Most of the Sages who could cast it were starting to at least look gray, granted…”

Mu knew exactly why she had managed to cast something like Bolganone in the first place, and stuffed the little fearful thrill of ‘They know, they know, it’s the dragonblood’ down where it belonged, roiling alongside the nausea in her gut. “Really, I’m not. I’ve never even touched a Mastery Seal, let alone earned one.”

Cato snorted. “Whoever kept you from getting accredited was a damn fool, then. Hell, even if you aren’t, I’d be a fool to pass a Sage up. My company’s got enough of a reputation to get clients, and you’d be paid pretty well for the job, given how useful it is to have mages around a fight.”

They’re... trying to recruit me? Mu rested her hand on the book in her sash, silent. “I’ll… I can’t. I have somewhere I need to go.”

“We’ll be around the Metro Port for at least another year if you ever change your mind,” Cato shrugged, carefully casual.

“I won’t,” Mu said bluntly, unable to stop her gaze from sliding over to the cooling corpses before she could yank her attention away from them.

Cato caught on anyways. Their hard expression softened, and they looked almost kind for it. “First kill?”

The Mafia goon in the gaol, still smoldering, and Mu’s flight from the cell, too frantic in her attempt to escape to really think about it. “... No.”

“First battle?”

The flight from the island could never be called a battle; there wasn’t the people, or the noise, or the almost-casual cleanup. “... Yeah.”

Cato sighed, gustily. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Look at it this way- you’re in Cook and Metro territory. A fight was going to happen eventually.”

“I just wanted them to stop,” Mu whispered, hating how plaintive she sounded.

Cato’s head cocked to the side, curious. “And are you sorry you stopped them?”

“Not sorry that I got them to stop, but does… does it always feel this… bad?” Mu asked lamely, unable to dredge up the words for the fact that even if someone was trying to kill her, she didn’t like the way it felt to kill them, even if it was an easy scale to weigh her life against their own upon.

“You get used to it,” Cato shrugged. And then sighed, tapping the pommel of their sword. “My advice, though? Get better at fighting. So it’s easier to avoid killing people, if you feel so strongly about it.” Their gaze met hers, serious and steady as the tide. “If you kill someone, it shouldn’t be by accident.”

Mu looked across the broken line of wagons, torn canvas fluttering in the breeze and people frantically swarming around repairs or healing or cleanup- including a pair of mercenaries who had begun to stack the half-ashen bodies of the goons that Mu killed for a full cremation. She set her jaw, thinking about what Cato said.

It meant she might need to… rethink her plans to get the pirates off her home island. If it came down to her life or her enemy’s, Mu knew which she would pick. If she ever had to take a life again… it was nauseating, and it twisted in her gut like something between fear and satisfaction and guilt, but she didn’t want it to be an accident.

--

“Ah, Lady Paracos, what brings you to my fine prison this evening?”

“Nothing, just… You aren’t monsters, are you.”

“Indeed not. But I thought you were already aware of that?”

“I am, but I just think this is something you would understand.”

“Oh?”

“Half the court thinks I’m a monster- Mother said another proposal fell through. Lady Apolonia Pryce has been spreading rumors, and now the people who were my allies won’t even let their sons near me!”

“Your passion scares them, my lady. Love is beautiful, but not everyone can truly see that. My own heart’s love didn’t see that, no matter how hard I tried to get him to understand.”

“You were married?”

“Not as humans know it, no. But even after all the work I put into making our relationship perfect… it wasn’t enough, for him, and he allowed someone else to sire a child on him. And because of the war… I died, before I could teach him otherwise.”

“I thought dragons weren’t monogamous? Not like people are.”

“We are not. But that does not matter. What matters is that he did not seek my counsel. It is as if your most beloved simply flew away from the den without asking you, and then never returned. It tears at the soul.”

“That’s… horrible. But I think I understand, because I… a few years ago, I caught my fiance with another woman. He betrayed me, but instead of being hanged for treason like a traitor ought to, Mother changed it to exile. For political reasons.”

“Oh, my dear Lady Paracos, I understand your woes, more than you can imagine. But look at it this way! If your old fiance is still alive, and you still love him, it means you can find him again. Test him, and teach him, and keep him close, so that he may never hurt you so terribly again.”

“Is that what you did? With your husband?”

“It was, but we both perished in the war. I know his soul is still trapped, somewhere- he refused to leave the continent, even as we were losing against Tempus and her Crusaders.”

“... What if you could be reunited?”

“Truly?”

“You… you understand me better than my fiance did, or Mother, or all the ladies of the court. I want to help you! It’s still the first month of winter, so doing it will be hard… but I think we can find your husband. And then I can find my fiance, and try again.”

“You do me great honor, Lady Paracos. And it would be my pleasure to help you find your lost love, as well.”

Chapter Text

“Dearest Eshe,

I’m sure the military report sent to your battalion arrived already, and that your report from your imminent victory will be arriving here soon, but if it hasn’t (because official army channels can be slow as hell, all tied up in paperwork and triplicate), consider this my warning to you and your soldiers.

If you kill a dragon, don’t count it as a full victory this time. It might not be dead yet.

When we felled Tacitus, all of us rejoiced in cutting off the head of the snake. So sure that we had victory in our grasp that we failed to understand why the other dragons in his contingent ceased their assault and focused on taking his body with them. Of course we let them do so- even dragons deserve to give their fallen leaders the appropriate grave-rites.

Word of advice- if you kill another dragon, destroy the body. Rend it to pieces, burn it, anything. Because my battalion almost got wiped out when the Immovable took to the battlefield after his death. Dark, and odd, with a strange scent of otherness- but still Tacitus, our enemy’s leader.

I interrogated Lady Tempus on this defiance of nature, and her shock nearly matched my own, because she thought this was common knowledge. Dragons just plain don’t die like we do- their souls can return to and repair their bodies after death, so long as there is a body to return to, and another dragon to call the soul to the body. It’s why she insisted on keeping the weapons we killed a dragon with, if we managed to shed blood at all. She has… methods, to keep a dragon’s soul from reviving their body, so long as she has that blood and manages to catch the soul before it returns.

To correct this oversight, she taught me how to do it myself- “We’re meant to be each others’ claws, when the other is away,” she said. She flew off to do the same for the other Crusaders.

You mentioned injuring a young Fire Dragon in the last sally of your current battle, yes? I dearly hope there’s still some blood left on the field you can take, so that once it finally dies, even if it dies away from our battlefield, we can keep it from coming back to rain fire on our heads. Say what you will about creatures that large- they sure do bleed quite a bit.

Tacitus is still an active agent in this war. Be wary, my love.

Saint Valor be with you,

Crusader Cassandre Walker.”

--

Mu bid farewell to the caravan not three days after the encounter with the toll-collectors, just as they passed the road winding to the Gates of Paracos. Sar Cato didn’t bother her again about joining their mercenary company, but still sent her off with a letter that may help her get through the Gates. They had winked, saying it never hurt to have such an up-and-coming magical prodigy in their debt.

Mu insisted she wasn’t a prodigy. And had scowled when Cato ruffled her hair, gave her a knowing look, and said “Sure, missy.”

It was a mere week’s journey on foot to the Gates, but it still felt like years, the storm of thoughts swirling in Mu’s mind seemingly stretching the short hike into one far longer.

She gave up attempting to keep those winds trapped within her.

Snatcher’s covers flipped open, red spilling over the pages in a color familiar enough it made Mu shudder. “Finally going to spill on what has you sulking so much?”

“Did it- was… You said you fought. In the Crusaders’ War. Was it easy for you? Or was it hard?” Was it hard, realizing just how easy it was?

His previous words faded into the pages, like mud in the rain. Finally, after what seemed like ages, his reply seeped up. “Yeesh, not pulling any punches, are you? This about the thing with the caravan?”

Mu didn’t bother answering that, instead scowling at him, because duh.

“Okay, fine, that was kind of obvious. But… kind of both. Humans are pretty squishy, and even in active battle it was easy to just glide above and breathe fire on ‘em.” An army of tiny dots marched across the page, soon engulfed in the smudged red of fire. And then, looming above, was the scowling caricature of a Crusader, with Tempus’s mark on a banner. “Of course, once the Crusaders or Tempus herself showed up, every dragon except the real heavy-hitters learned to run, if they wanted to stay alive. Narga is not something you want to get smacked with, trust me.”

Mu rolled her eyes. “Not easy as in how simple it is to squish a human, oh mighty Fire Dragon. I mean easy as in like… y’know. How it- ugh- feels.”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there. It’s easy from a distance, but up close… I had a hard time looking at my human friends, after my first battle.”

“You had human friends?” Mu pounced.

“... You weren’t supposed to see that.”

“Aw, c’mon, I didn’t know there were any dragons out there with human friends at all! Well, besides us, I mean.” At least, she thought they were. Sure, they each had something the other wanted, but they also talked a lot just for the fun of it. That was what friends did when they traveled, right? Endless miles of road and conversation to stitch the days together with; even surrounded by other people while they traveled with the caravan, Mu had been lonely. “And you never mentioned anyone from before the war!”

“We’re not friends,” Snatcher snapped, page-corners flicking in agitation.

“... Oh.” And Mu really expected that, but it still hurt, just a little bit. “Right.”

“Oh, don’t look at me like that…” he said, his text softened at the edges. Then, like a sigh, the letters spun haphazardly across the paper, in a way Mu now knew meant he didn’t have as complete control over his words as he usually did, paper catching his thoughts before he could stop it. “It’s just… hard to remember that they’re long-dead. Cam would have been in her seventies when I died-”

“Is that one of them? Cam?” Mu asked, brimming with curiosity, because she had no idea humans and dragons actually coexisted back then!

“Hey, let me finish, yeesh. Yeah, she was a friend of mine. She stayed out of the Crusaders’ War, so there was that at least.”

Mu imagined facing Luka, or High Sage Maradoth, or any of her friends in battle. Shivered, despite the warm summer air. “Yeah, that’s… that’s good, at least.” A connection flitted through her mind, like the smoke from the now-routine magic practice with Snatcher. “Say, is she why you know human spells?”

Paper ruffled against itself, like a hissing laugh. “Hah! She didn’t have an inkling of desire to learn magic! I just learned human spells because I could.”

“So you’re just a huge nerd, got it.”

“Oh, that’s real rich coming from you!” Sharp, formulaic lines arced in the same patterns as spell-diagrams. “Who’s the real ‘nerd’, me or the kid who interrogated me for hours about Tempus and her pet humans?”

“Oh, come on, it’s interesting! You’re the one who said it was so unusual, since she made pacts with a bunch of people at once.” Mu frowned, dredging up memories of old historical accounts, read under the cover of night in a library the Mafia never bothered with. “Though I never did figure out what the whole ‘In times of peril Tempus would use her Crusaders’ loyalty to walk among us again’ thing was about,” Mu intoned, comically serious.

There was nothing comical about the gravity in Snatcher’s reply, blood pooling heavy and bolded into words. “Yeah, because that’s why having so many pacted humans freaked the rest of us out. With that many people-” Abruptly, he cut himself off, words erased as if they were never there.

Mu frowned, holding the book closer to her eyes, tilting him to and fro. “What’s that got to do with Tempus’s return?”

“Nothing. It’s got nothing to do with it.” Snatcher’s reply scrawled just a little too fast across his page, hasty and clearly uncomfortable.

Mu scoffed. “Fine, be that way.” Forget hoarding gold, dragons clearly hoarded secrets, if anything.

She’d just pester him about it later.

--

Fwoosh-thwomp.

Hmm, not quite the size Mu was aiming for- the fireball was too big.

Fwoosh-thwomp.

Smaller this time, but way too intense, like standing too close to the channeled lava flows.

Fwoosh-thwomp.

Shush-snap.

Ah, Snatcher. She was surprised he hadn’t already poked his papery snout into what she was doing already. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why are you casting a bunch of Fire spells off the road? Because starting fires is conspicuous.”

Absentmindedly, Mu let the magic-sparks spin around her fingers, adding the formulae all the way up to Bolganone and then removing them from the equation until it was a simple Fire spell again. Like balancing on the rails of the convent’s balconies. It was good practice, in case she needed to suddenly cut off a spell mid-cast. “Just practicing. I’ve been thinking about what you and Cato said- I at least want to make sure there’s not, y’know, collateral damage when we fight the Mafia back home.” She winced, thinking of the burning gaol like a watchtower beacon in the night, and hoped that the winds were feeling generous that night, so that no sparks travelled from the gaol to fragile civilian rooftops.

“And you think courting a grass-fire is practice?”

Mu snorted. “What grass? It’s all rock over here.” She turned him around so his pages faced the road- a packed gravel path, sure, but beyond it would be difficult to pass by any method besides on foot.

A stark expanse of skittering stone and violent outcroppings greeted them, barren but for the most stubborn, scrubbiest trees clinging to cliffsides. Truly huge shattered furrows raked across the plain, like some unfathomably large monster had gouged out chasms and upended rocky hills.

“I… I recognize this place.” Snatcher’s text was just as jagged as the stone. “I’d forgotten in the vault, but… I was here for this battle.”

“Wait, you were?” Mu exclaimed. “What happened here?”

“It was- it had to be only the third or fourth major battle as an alliance, instead of individual flights of dragons fighting the humans as they moved nearer. The Ice clan’s Chief had requested that I act as his messenger to the alliance, since Ice Dragons cannot fly just as surely as I cannot swim under their sea-ice. I barely had time to drop off my-” The words cut off ruthlessly as a cut throat, red splashing across the page to cover up his apparent slip. “... Let’s just say the flight from Nikolaos to here is long. And I though I got there early enough, I still got caught in the battle. But I didn’t even need to fight much, because after a few days, The Immovable was there.”

“Tacitus- you mean he was here?” Mu looked up from Snatcher, trying to pick out which of the paralleled furrows were made by Earth Dragon claws. And then thought about how massive such a creature would be, sized to match with those claws. Eeep...

“I cannot believe I had forgotten all this… but yes, The Immovable was here. It was his first battle after his restoration, and though there were no Crusaders here, it was a victory, if a destructive one- The Immovable was ticked. Didn’t even bother sticking around for the cleanup, not that anything would grow after the amount of Dark Magic the humans threw around. He tore off straight to Crusader Walker’s army, before the survivors here could send a messenger-crow out to warn them.” Snatcher’s words had an almost wry tilt to them, now. “You’d think everything would be insignificant in the face of a rampaging Immovable, but one of the humans got me with a ballista- grounded me more out of surprise than anything.”

Mu shivered, thinking about the ballistae she’d seen lining Codport’s docks as a deterrent to pirates. “Did it hurt a lot?”

“I dunno. However much it hurts for a human to get stabbed, probably.”

“Well, that’s not a metric I can use, since I’ve never been stabbed before.”

“I would prefer you remain un-stabbed.”

Mu snorted. “Yeah, I’d prefer to stay un-stabbed too. Seems like a reasonable thing to want, in my opinion.” She grinned, sly. “Besides, friends don’t let friends get stabbed, right?”

“... Is this your way of biting back for the ‘friends’ comment?”

“Yes,” Mu said primly.

“Heh, if keeping each other alive and un-stabbed is the primary qualifier for human friendships, we may as well be-“ His text swirled into a saccharine pink, curling and bubbling in the most obnoxious handwriting Mu had ever seen. “-Best friends forever!”

“Saints, please never use that writing style again,” Mu bemoaned. But she was still smiling anyway. “I accept your offer of friendship, since I’m such a gracious human friend.”

Despite the sarcastic edge of teasing, she could tell he was being genuine. And that in itself meant they were already friends, in a way.

--

The Gates of Paracos rose into view like a mountain range, blued by the mist of distance and stretching further than the eye could see in either direction.

“Oh, that’s going to be a pain to get through,” Mu muttered, because she wasn’t exactly an Omnecian citizen, and in fact was carrying the very kind of thing that Queen Eilwyn sealed the borders to keep out.

Snatcher snapped the leather of his cover in a way that said he wanted to write something, and obligingly Mu opened him. “Come on, it can’t be that hard to cross. Human buildings aren’t exactly the sturdiest in the world.”

She wasn’t even going to bother dignifying that with a response. Instead, Mu spun the book around, opening him as far as she could so he faced the Gates of Paracos in their full looming glory, tall enough to shade the border-towns like the cliffs back home shaded the tide-pools.

She let him get a good, long look before turning him around again to face her. “Okay, yeah, that’s… new. And not something we can just climb over.”

“Told you. And not all of us can just fly over our problems.”

“I don’t just fly over my problems,” Snatcher replied, letters perfectly paced and insufferably prim. “I also set them on fire.”

“If only we could set all our problems on fire,” Mu sighed dramatically, mood light despite the daunting barrier before them, and stuffed the dragon-possessed book back into her sash along the small of her back, where it would be hidden behind her cloak and bag. “Now try and be quiet, since you’re exactly the kind of thing Queen Eilwyn shut down the borders to keep out.”

At least she’d apparently made an interesting enough impression on that mercenary captain, given the letter and the favor. Or maybe they weren’t just a mercenary, given they used such familiar terms with the captain of the border guard. Of course, Snatcher had scolded her for reading someone else’s mail, but it’s not like he had room to complain; he was uptight about the weirdest things.

Mu shaded her eyes against the summer sun, and squinted at the sky-brushing wall. It seemed to somehow get taller the closer she got.

At least with the favor from Cato she wouldn’t have to do something risky, like crawling through the pipes.

--

Stone of the wall’s pipes scraping at her hair and bag, water soaking into the knees of her pants, Mu regretted every optimistic notion that ever crossed her mind. Stupid, like a cloud-addled sailor in a sea-squall. Of course the Metro-hired guards wouldn’t allow some random, obviously-foreign teenager through their side of the gates with no passport and nothing to prove herself besides a letter. A letter that they wouldn’t allow to reach Sir Grooves, Captain of the Guard.

“‘It could be a forgery!’” Mu groused under her breath, mocking. “‘You’re a foreigner with no papers, no passport, and you’re either the most obvious smuggler or the worst spy I’ve ever seen!’”

Pah! As if she’s ever spy for the Mafia Boss.

… Though the accusations of smuggling were, admittedly, accurate. Snatcher had been quiet, like she told him to be while they were in the border town, but Mu swore she could feel some kind of coiled tension from the book tucked at the small of her back, like the hiss of steam from a volcanic vent preceding something much hotter-

Mu froze. There were voices by her, muffled through the layers of stone and metal grate-doors studding the sides of the pipes.

Footsteps. The faint clank of well-fitted armor as the patrol passed her by. Mu released a sigh of relief as it kept going.

She sucked that relieved breath back in when she heard the footsteps come back.

“Did you hear something?” Guard One said, hair-raisingly close to the grate.

“No? Are you jumping at nothing again?” Guard Two replied, but followed Guard One closer to the pipes running through the walls anyway. Shit.

“I don’t think so, but… it doesn’t hurt to check.” Iron scraped against stone, and Mu could do nothing but stay frozen in place, because if she moved, the splashing would give her away-

A dark-haired head popped out of the hole where the grate had been, and met Mu’s eyes. Uh-oh.

“Holy- there’s someone in the pipes!”

Mu scrambled to back up, away from the guard-

A stone-scraping bang, as the grate behind her was shoved away and another guard’s voice echoed off the wet rock. “I see ‘em!”

Between backwards or forwards, Mu had to pick a direction to go.

Guard One’s eyes reflected firelight just before she yanked her head out of the pipe to avoid Mu’s frantically-thrown Fire spell. With the way clear, Mu scrambled for it, mindless of the splashing noise and slap of wet boots on stone; but still in the back of her mind she felt a corner of concern, hoping that Snatcher wasn’t getting wet, because paper and water did not mix.

Chasing after the dissipating plumes of flame, Mu felt something grab at her ankle like iron.

She managed to avoid cracking her jaw on the water-stained stone. Barely.

Mu rolled around, ready to cave the face in of whoever stopped her, spells humming under her skin and formulae spinning in her memory-

She froze when something cold and terrifyingly silver-sharp dimpled the skin of the back of her neck. “Get out of the pipes. Or your head goes.”

Heart in her throat, Mu rose shaking hands in the universal gesture of surrender, slowly edging her way through the grate inch by inch, painfully aware of the sword at her throat.

Once she was on her feet and out of the pipes, Mu had to look up to see the guard, blade-tip still pointed precariously at her neck. She stiffened into a defiant glare, though the effect was probably ruined by the water-stains on her tunic and wet braids dripping pipe-water onto the ground.

“Yeesh, they’re sending ‘em through younger and younger every year, huh…” Guard One muttered, clearly discomfited by Mu’s youth, but her blade remained level. “Doesn’t matter. You’re coming with me to see the captain, kid.”

Mu almost sliced herself open on the sword pointed at her, before remembering that smacking herself in the face and groaning probably wasn’t the expected behavior from a smuggler fished out of the pipes like a sea-rat. “Yeah, actually, please take me to the captain.”

Guard One’s eyes narrowed, suspicious. But she still jerked her head and commanded “Come on, then. He’ll decide what to do with you.”

Somehow, despite this being the end result Mu wanted when she tried to pass the Gates the first time, it sounded more threatening than the weapon being brandished at her.

Chapter Text

Sir Grooves,

Assuming this letter actually reaches you, assume I’m cashing in on one of the favors you owe me. Only one of them, mind, I still intend on collecting for the other times.

I know you’re technically only beholden to the Metro, and thus your employer, but consider this my request to let Muriel of the Pelan Isle across the border into Omnoc. It’s my suspicion that she’s trying to get to the Zenith School of Magic for official accreditation as a Sage. Yes, she’s ten years too young to take the tests according to the average age of an ascending Sage. But trust me, because do you really think I would sponsor someone who was simply average?

(You and I both know how important it is to keep powerful people on your side these days. Even baby prodigy mages. My judgement has never failed us yet, no?)

PS: There’s another letter enclosed in this, for Apolonia Pryce, once she gets sent over by the Queen again to pester you about security. I’m trusting you not to open it, you incorrigible old gossip. Not unless you want to learn more about our preferences than you ever wanted to!

Your old shield-sibling and current friend,

Sar Cato Larsen.

--

The office was about what Mu expected from a republic that guarded their profits jealously as a salt-merchant would guard his pools- well-appointed, shelves of files and books lining the room, a Brave Axe hanging off the wall as both a threat and a display of wealth.

The captain, however, was not what she expected. Captain Grooves leaned casually on his seat, only half-armored and with a relaxed air that reminded Mu of a fisherman hanging his line off the cliffs, just for the fun of it.

Finally. Mu shrugged off the iron-gauntleted grip on her shoulder, marching to the enormous oak desk and slamming the damp letter onto its surface. “Here,” she seethed, the mind-shuddering terror of the sword-threat finally easing in favor of plain frustration at the whole thing. “This is from Sar Cato.”

One brow arched, Grooves took the letter, motioning for his guard to stay put as she moved to restrain Mu again. Slowly, a smile tugged on the corner of his mouth; a white slash of teeth against dark skin. “Well, why didn’t you just say Cato was sponsoring you! You didn’t need to crawl through the pipes like some kind of smuggler, darling!”

“I did say the letter was from Cato. But your guards at the front gate wouldn’t let me in,” Mu bit out. “They thought it was a forgery.”

“Oh, don’t be too hard on them” Grooves waved her off, tucking the letters into some pocket beneath his armor. “They’re just doing their jobs.”

I’ll be as hard on them as I want to. Maybe see if they like getting their life threatened, Mu thought menacingly, but kept quiet.

“But, either way, I can certainly send you through… if you do me a favor,” Grooves went on, tapping the desk. “Though I’m employed by the Metropolitan Merchant Republic, Queen Eilwyn does have some sway here, since it’s her Gate. And giving someone a temporary passport when the borders are sealed is no small thing.” He brightened, clapping his hands together. “But I can make an exception for a prodigious young mage sent by an old friend!”

“That’s pretty generous of you, Boss,” Guard One said from behind Mu, clear affection in her voice. Ugh, they all loved this guy, didn’t they?

Mu weighed her options. Stopped weighing them when she realized she didn’t have any other options. “Okay, what is it you need me to do?” she sighed.

“See, we have a bit of a smuggling problem- and the queen keeps sending one of her more threatening lordlings over to ask why yet more contraband is appearing in the palace. I’m rather offended she insinuated I was letting them through on purpose, actually. My guards are the finest in the land, after all!” He gestured to the soldier behind Mu, who stood straighter in perfect military attention, lined with pride. “It’s my suspicion that it’s the Omnecian border knight, Sir Amos, who is letting these smugglers and their blood-magic through.”

“And you want me to do something about it? But you’ve got a whole squad of guards, can’t you just take care of it yourself?” Mu protested.

“Oh, no, I don’t expect you to fight or anything, darling!” Grooves reassured. “Just take a look around his office while you’re getting his signature for your passage, and report back to me what you see. If I managed to get there myself to check, he’d have plenty of time to hide everything, after all!”

That was… surprisingly reasonable. She’d picked the pockets of scarier people than one border guard. But still. “I can poke around for contraband or hidden cubbies but… only if you throw something else in,” Mu decided, remembering some very important information about her journey. Namely, that North Omnoc was cold, even in summer, and would only get colder as autumn approached. “Nothing like money or anything!” Though I could use that anyway… “Just a winter cloak and some food.”

“Oh, you don’t even need to ask about that, darling! I’ll even throw in one of the field-healing kits- the Republic invests a lot into this, after all. They won’t notice one more kit going missing,” Grooves said, already spreading out paper and dipping his quill in ink. “Just make sure you get a nice, long look at whatever Amos is doing up there. The more detail, the better.”

Hesitantly, Mu took the letter and temporary passport. “So I just… get his signature on this, spy on his office, and then I can go?”

“Make sure to come back and report what you saw, of course. And pick up your supplies. Wouldn’t want you freezing to death on the way to Zenith!” Grooves chuckled, as if the possibility of a native Pelan child freezing in Omnoc’s decidedly non-tropical winter wasn’t a very real fear.

Feeling bolder now that she had one half of her ticket North, Mu tucked it into her sash and imitated the salute she saw the guard do earlier. “You got a deal, Sir Grooves.”

As the guard captain smiled indulgently at her gesture and waved them away, Mu felt a bit ragged on the edges still, but confident. Compared to the flight from the convent, or the caravan battle, this would be easy.

--

This is a terrible idea, Snatcher thought, hidden under Mu’s cloak and stuffed in her sash.

Beyond the tight red weave of Mu’s cloak, Snatcher could still sense the movement outside his range; faint heat-shadows passing them by in whole packs, armed guards prowling the halls like wolves. And Mu seemed wholly unbothered by the crammed hallway.

I’d forgotten just how much humans like to live all smushed in together in huge flocks, Snatcher mused. Granted, he’d forgotten a lot of things, down in the sunless depths of the convent vault. But not the important ones- the ones that if he forgot, he would know he was falling prey to the degeneration that plagued his kind. His child, who must be over seven hundred by now- old enough to fly and hunt on their own, but still far too young to leave the nest. Camellia, and their friendship that was brief even in human timespans, but no less meaningful. Battles, and council meetings, and any number of scattered parts of his life.

And his death. Snatcher didn’t ever think he could forget his death, nor could he stop the twist of resentment and fear and old hate that clung to his soul like frostbitten chains.

He stuffed that thought down into the endless back-spiral of memory in between his pages. Always the chains. And the cold.

Chains, and cold… He wasn’t quite sure what condition his body was in- it had been centuries, and he hadn’t died in battle as any self-respecting dragon ought to. Even if he was nothing but bones, Snatcher resolved centuries ago to do whatever it took to make up for his mistakes; he had the driving emotions to, if not the body. Love that was both new and old and entirely unknown, for his child. That same brightness’s shadow of hate, for his beloved Venka.

The snarl accompanying the thought of her name whispered from his page-ends as they crinkled up, and Snatcher immediately stilled, because once again, he thought taking a blood-magic tainted object (“You can’t steal a person” echoed behind his thoughts, and he could not ignore it) into a guard captain’s room was a terrible idea.

What seemed like endless doors and turns and stairs later, a new voice vibrated through the air. “Oi, what did I tell you about bringing random people up here? If there’s no passport, turn ‘em away at the door!”

“Um, but this one was sent by Sir Grooves, sir,” the guard escorting them said, fidgeting awkwardly. “They have his signature and everything.”

“What? Give me that!” Rustling paper, and the snap of folded edges. “Feh, it’s official and everything. Whatever, what’s your name, uh… Eh, Mx…?”

If Snatcher had eyes he would have rolled them, and he felt Mu tense at the question. “Miss. My name is Muriel,” she ground out.

“My apologies, lass.” And the knight sounded genuinely contrite. Snatcher never did quite get the awkwardness around asking- it’s not like you could tell with dragons. Or with humans, really- colorful clothing aside, they tended to look mostly the same to him. “Well, since you’re here on official business to the School, I can send you right on through- wait.”

Tension sang in the room like ozone, and the guard asked in a trembling voice “Um, Conductor, sir?”

“Grab her.”

Sudden movement, and flailing, and “Hey, lemme go!”

And then, light, as Snatcher was yanked out of Mu’s sash and slammed onto the desk.

He got his first look at the Conductor- Sir Amos- through his covers; the Mage Fighter was short and graying, armored, and holding a Fire spell, ready to cast, and Snatcher had never been burned before, not in his draconic body, but he could feel the searing heat from the spell, glass-hot and way, way too close-

“Wait!” Mu cried, expression terrified for- for him.

(Snatcher hated being a book, hated the way his pride had burned away like morning mist, the way it would be terribly easy to just... reach out to her hands and blood and make them his, even as his very soul shuddered at the thought, repulsed at the idea of doing anything like Ven did to him-

Hated being trapped and paper-fragile and relying on a child to keep him safe when it should be the other way around, because protecting drachlings was so important it may as well be perfect instinct-)

The fire-brandishing hand halted. Slowly retreated, and snuffed out the flames. “I’ll give you ten seconds to explain why you thought you could sneak in blood-magic past me.”

Even as blade-cold fear bit into her breath, Mu kept her voice from breaking. “I- see- Sir Grooves was trying to set you up! I’m just the messenger!” she lied, breathless as Snatcher remained perfectly frozen. “He said- the only way he would let me through is if I planted contraband in your office, so he would get credit for calling it in to the Queen while also discrediting you!”

Silence, and the Conductor fisted his hand around the pommel of his sword, threatening as the rising tide. “That bastard. I should have known he was behind the smuggling!” He whirled towards the visibly-sweating guard, still holding Mu’s arms behind her back. “Do you have any idea how annoying it is to have Little Miss Lady Pryce snooping around here every single moon?”

“No, sir,” the guard said wearily, as if used to being bombarded with the knight’s frustrated rhetorical questions.

“Yeah, see, the place is better-run under you!” Mu blurted out, and Oh spirits kid, don’t talk yourself into a situation we can’t get out of, don’t be stupid- “So, I- I can help you, I promise, if you give me the book back.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“I’ll… I’ll plant it in Sir Grooves’ office instead. Yeah! So I can help you instead, if you let me past the gates.”

“Hmm...” the Conductor scratched at his scruffy beard, mulling it over. “Very clever, little lassie. I approve!”

I cannot believe he bought it.

On the Conductor’s cue, the guard let Mu go, and Snatcher’s vision was engulfed in red as she scooped him off the table and held him tight against her. “I’ll take care of that right away, Sir Amos. It should be ready in a while, if there’s some way you can get over there in time?”

“Ohoho, yes, I’ll need to draw up the papers to force an inspection- I’m sure Her Majesty will be very pleased when I plug up the last hole in her fortress.” The Conductor sat heavily at his desk, paper haphazardly snatched and scattered as he dug for the forms. “Give me three hours from now, and get through the inner gates. Best of luck to ye, lassie. Owl! Escort our little agent back to the Metro side!”

“My name is Owen…” the guard muttered, but did as he was told anyways.

Mu stuffed Snatcher back into her sash. She absentmindedly patted him, to make sure he stayed, and even if it wasn’t something Snatcher could feel, in this nerveless but not bloodless body, it still felt- nice.

(Resolutely, he shoved away spark-fluttering memories of tiny, soft claws resting on his snout, needle-teeth nibbling at his fangs to rouse him and get him to play.)

(Just leftover nesting instincts that never faded after his death.)

--

Okay, this was… salvageable. Mu would just need to be quick about it. And smart about it, because Sir Amos’s office… that was too close. Way, way too close- close enough that just remembering to breathe on the way to Sir Grooves’ office took concentration. Because seeing Amos’s pointed fire, pulsing close enough to singe the corners of Snatcher’s cover…

Mu got attached to her teachers. She was aware enough to admit it- High Sage Maradoth, Luka, and, now, Snatcher, who really was a great magic teacher when he wasn’t being weird and dragony, or just plain annoying. He had a lot of things to say and stories to tell, and Mu was happy to listen to the old fire-tales he spun on his pages; the Crusaders’ War and even centuries before that.

As the thoughts of teachers and close calls and fire swam in her mind, Mu brushed her fingers against the book in her sash, just to make sure. She had to pull off another save like the one in Sir Amos’s office, if she wanted to get out of this with Snatcher alive and with herself un-arrested.

At least this time she actually planned what she would say.

When Mu poked her head around the doorframe, Metro-hired guard a polite distance away from her, Sir Grooves visibly brightened and beckoned her in. “Oh, our little aide is here! Tell me darling, did you find anything?”

Hesitantly, Mu entered, keeping her eyes level. Snatcher was hidden again against her lower back, tucked firmly into her sash, and she forced her hands away from checking to make sure he was there again. “I did, but… it’s not what you wanted.”

“Oh?” Grooves’ voice was both breezy and calculating, enough to make Mu feel like she was stepping barefoot on the beach after a storm, where still-living jellyfish lay, invisible to her eyes but still stinging.

So Mu countered that by employing the legendary, ancient technique called lying. “See, Sir Amos said he would only sign the passport for me if-” She leaned in closer, hand cupped around her mouth in a conspiratorial whisper. “-if I planted blood-magic contraband in your office. But don’t worry!” she reassured, wiggling her fingers in the approximation of a thief’s sleight-of-hand. “I stashed it in his place instead. He said he’s going to try and force an inspection in about three hours, though.”

Grooves leaned onto his desk, eyes dark. “That’s… quite the dire accusation, darling. But it does confirm my suspicions- that he’s facilitating the movement of magical contraband.” He nodded, decisively. “Three hours, you said?”

“Yeah, he said he’d be bringing a force to the main gates.”

“So he’s playing serious then…” Grooves muttered. “I have preparations to make. Gloria will take you to the barracks to get your supplies, and once you show me what the blood-magic is and where he hid it, you can be on your way.”

Uh-oh. “Surely I don’t have to be there? I mean… if you ask him about it he’ll probably start sweating!”

“It’s too easy for him to deny it with the only witness unable to testify.” Grooves shook his head, solemn. “You need to be there. If you’re worried about him, don’t worry darling- I’ll be bringing my finest guards to the gates.”

And that’s exactly what she was afraid of. Mu would just have to improvise. “I- okay. If you can keep him away.” Because I do not want to be in range of a Mage Fighter if he realizes he’s been tricked.

“Thank you, Miss Muriel. The Metropolitan Merchant Republic and Queen Eilwyn will certainly be grateful for your part in exposing this corruption!” Grooves said, looking entirely too gleeful at the prospect of tearing his Omnecian counterpart off the wall.

Better him than me, Mu thought.

Chapter Text

“Draconic degeneration was observed primarily in older individuals in their species, and though their rationality diminishes, they are more dangerous than others of their kind. Indications included loss of memory, and territorial behavior and possessiveness far beyond the norm, to the point that any living being, human or animal or dragon, would be slain for stepping foot in what they considered theirs. Their ability to reason diminishes, and the indiscriminate violence degenerated dragons wreak makes them just as much a threat to their own kind as to us.

Degeneration was most commonly seen in individuals in the range of 4,000 to 15,000 years old, though cases in younger adult dragons were more frequently recorded as the Crusaders’ War approached. Those who sealed their power into a dragonstone and allowed themselves to spend time in a humanoid form were able to stave off the degeneration, but it is unknown how successful such a stopgap was, as the Crusaders’ War began a thousand years after this solution was created.

There were no known cases of draconic degeneration in hybrids. If this is due to small sample size or if they are immune, it is unknown.”

--

The guard, Gloria, wasn’t as intimidating as she looked. She was rather nice, actually, as she walked Mu through the supplies in the field-healing kit, and gave her tips on cold-weather traveling for the future- apparently Gloria was from Nikolaos, one of the northernmost communities in Omnoc.

It made Mu almost feel bad about ditching. Almost.

Tucked into a corner of the empty barracks after taking the opportunity to pack her bag and re-braid her hair, Mu cracked open Snatcher, sneaking furtive glances down the hall just in case.

“I told you this was a bad idea.”

As if she didn’t already know that. “Look, I had to improvise, okay? He was about to kill you!”

Red blood-ink faded in and out of the page, in a familiar pattern, almost like- breathing?

“Dying once was terrible enough, yeah, so… we need to be even more careful then. These honor-obsessed types can be dangerous for a squirt like you.”

“It’s just us,” Mu muttered, half in her own realization, half for Snatcher. “We need to look out for each other, or how else are we gonna liberate Pelan?”

“... Just being a book sucks,” Snatcher finally said, distinctly grumbly, his words leaden as if a weary and heavy-handed writer had torn them into the pages. “I shouldn’t have to rely on a human child to stay in one piece.”

“I mean, yeah, I get going from a dragon to this-” She gently ruffled at the pages. “-is a serious pride-downgrade.”

“I’m- that’s not… hm.” Suddenly the words vanished, consumed by vague lines draping across the page, followed by a winged blob that was dwarfed by a much larger one- both of them looking eerily like Snatcher’s illegible illustration of a Fire Dragon he’d drawn earlier. And then, crawling across the paper like lightning in a stormcloud, clearly only half-controlled: “Children are- you have to understand, drachlings were… so rare. Treasured. It feels wrong for a drachling who flies to your guidance to defend you, instead of the other way around.”

The phrasing was odd, and very much draconic, but it still brought to mind thoughts of the cats on the wharf- the perfect predators, stalking a mouse as their kittens fumbled through the same steps behind them. “Drachling who flies to your guidance”... a student, in a way.

Teachers are supposed to defend their students, at the convent. Most of the time it was from mundane things, like protection from illness or even their parents, for the kids pulled from dangerous homes. But sometimes… Maradoth, killed after wiping out whole swathes of the Mafia fleet. Luka, seething out his refusal even as a Mafia goon pinned him by his neck.

And Snatcher, who was paper and leather instead of wings and claws and fire, who armed Mu with the most powerful Fire-series spells known to man.

“I get it,” Mu said simply. Because she did, even if not to the full depths that a dragon would. Dragons had apprentices and students too, after all. “Don’t get your spine in a twist, though, you worrywart. We’ve done fine so far, and I can take care of myself.”

Mu tried not to be too offended when Snatcher’s pages remained carefully blank.

--

There was one thing Mu would give to the obviously military-issue cloak, even if it was a bit long: it made it easy for her to blend in with the swarm of Metro-side guards marching to the main iron-latticed gates.

Slowly, Mu meandered further and further away from Sir Grooves, more along the edges of the squad. The guards on the outskirts paid her little mind, focused as they were on the line of Omnoc-outfitted soldiers, already waiting under the iron gate. And oh, that was a lot of soldiers, with some of them even mounted on horseback.

Although, those horses…

Mu caught offended and confused mutters, rippling out from where Sir Grooves marched right up to where the Conductor stood waiting, a sentinel not even bowing under the weight of the midday sun. “So, the little conspiracy leader slinks out of his cave! Did you come to surrender yourself to the Queen’s justice, Grooves? Because you’ve been sold out,” the Conductor declared, savoring victory.

Mu ducked her head, slinking between the engrossed audience of guards like a salt-weasel between stomping feet.

“Well, darling, I should be saying that to you! I knew you would go to great lengths to discredit me, but using a child as an agent? That’s cold, even for you.”

“What nonsense are you talking about now, you penguin-brained sellout? Upset your pet smuggler turned on you?”

Wreathed in the shadow of the gate-arch, Mu ghosted along the long stretch of brick wall and closer to the Conductor’s side of the conflict. One of the guards had even dismounted, angling himself closer on the ground to hear the argument. Perfect.

“I’m talking about you sending the student that was sponsored for passage back through the gates with blood-magic!”

“I only threw back at you what you tried to plant on me!”

Mu was a bit more conspicuous amid the Conductor’s soldiers, but their height still hid her well as she slipped into the ranks that were nearest to the gate-shadows.

“Enough with the evasion! Where is the contraband, you honorless wretch!”

“The book is in your office, because you have been in possession of the very thing Her Majesty ordered the borders sealed to keep out in the first place!”

Twitching, and murmuring from the guards, and though Mu could only see glimpses of them through the gaps in soldiers, it was easy to see the confusion coiled in their stances.

“... What book?” Grooves asked, taking his eyes off his rival to rake his eyes across his soldiers. “Miss Muriel? Care to explain where the confusion is?”

Her breath hitched, and she hissed through her teeth. “Shit.”

One of the Omnoc guards glanced behind him at the soft noise, eyes widening at the young face, and short height, and lack of armor. He sucked in a breath.

Mu stopped sneaking. Starting by lighting the guard’s shirt on fire.

With the guard crying “Fire- mage- help!” behind her, Mu bolted for the horse observing the entire scene like a particularly uninteresting play.

Swords rang and bows creaked as both guard forces aimed their weapons at the obvious perpetrators- their rivals.

Mu cast Elfire right at the feet of the Metro guards’ line, just for good measure; they shrieked in alarm, fire close enough to singe their brows. First one guard charged across the line, followed by all of them, their first sally repulsed by scything blades and deadly arrows arcing between hastily-brandished shields.

Faint in the crash of steel and whistle of arrows, Mu thought she heard a “You little backstabber!”. She ran faster, doing away with stealth and instead bowling past any soldiers that still weren’t at the throats of the Metro guards.

Mu felt the hairs prickle on her neck, heard the faint stinging crackle, tasted ozone-

Tucked herself to the ground and rolled, hands covering her ears as lightning split the sky.

Thoron? Since when do random guard-captains know that!?

But it was only a ribbon-flicker of a thought, insignificant in the face of a furious pair of guard captains behind her- very far away, and yet uncomfortably close, given Grooves could apparently cast Thoron-

Mu managed to dive away from the next cast. Barely- her ears rung with the sound of it, and painful tingles of electricity sparked through her bones. But she kept running towards her target, which was-

That is the most cannon-proof horse I have ever seen, Mu thought distantly, swinging up onto the lake-placid horse and kicking it away from the combat and the man who could shoot lightning out of his fingers and was very angry about her.

Mu chanced a glance back, looking for the telltale crackle of charging Thunder magic-

She missed the knife entirely, but something blazing in her blood moved her on instinct, jerking just far enough to the side that instead of sinking between her ribs, it-

Pain.

Red sparks flashing in her vision, fear of another blade choking her breath like acid, Mu yanked out the knife and flung it away. Didn’t look behind her, as the horse’s gallop ate the ground beneath her so fast it was a pulsing green blur behind her shocked tears.

She bunched the edge of her cloak around the throbbing blood-pulse of pain at her lower arm, and kicked the horse into a faster gallop even as her grip on the saddle-horn slipped in her sweaty hand.

--

“Storm-Catcher? Before we do this, I think we should look for the child, as well as the soul-container. The one your husband is in.”

“Hmm. Though I wasn’t precisely fond of the whelp and what they represented, the idea may have some merit. May I inquire as to why?”

“I sought out the castle’s vault because I… I know what it’s like to be lonely, and forsaken by those who I thought loved me. You’re going to be the only dragon not imprisoned, soon- don’t you think it would be terribly lonely, being the only one?”

“Hmm. I do see your point, Lady Paracos. You may have them, when we find them. But Lukianos is mine. Now, for our pact.”

“Oh! Your glass, it’s cracked! I know we needed your blood, but- are you injured?”

“It is temporary, and a small price to pay. My soul is bound to this blood, just as the glass is bound to this mirror, and as I will be bound to you.”

“... So be it. May Saint Fortune grant us our lost loves, and may Saint Justice guide our hands.”

Chapter Text

“Dragons, despite- or perhaps because of- their violent nature, are some of the finest parents to their young in the world. Such glimpses into their nature is rare for humans to know, but I am truly fortunate Ilah believes as I do- that we must learn from each other. So I write this in hopes that more shall do so, just as Ilah writes to dragons about humans with that same hope.

Young dragons can be physically independent as young as six hundred years old- about the equivalent of a human twelve-year-old. They can fly, and hunt, and manipulate their element on their own at that age. However, emotional factors in child-rearing are just as important to them, with the increase of the degeneration ever on the rise- dragons rarely leave the nest before they’re at least nine hundred fifty years old.

The highest, and simplest, laws dragons keep to surround their own kind and kin. Usually, if there are territory squabbles within a clan or flight, they are resolved through combat and ritual threats at their territory borders. However, kinslaying? Doing harm upon a drachling? Those involve the clan’s entire council, and multiple lawkeepers are expected to be present for the judgement. Oftentimes, should the perpetrator be found to purposely committing these crimes, it ends in execution.

(I asked Ilah how they even managed to do that, since killing a dragon doesn’t truly kill it, even if the body is destroyed- she told me many a tale of Loptyr the Vehement continuing their reign and enacting their atrocities through human hands, even after their draconic body was rendered to ashes. She informed me that such knowledge is exclusive even among the dragons themselves, and can only be done by dragons, regardless. I did not press her, given the rising tensions between our peoples.)

Young dragons are obviously treasured, with such laws considered the most sacred among their kind, and especially in these times; it may seem rare to those of us who grew up with a whole gaggle of siblings, but most dragons these days were only children. Natural protective instinct bred into them from untold millennia of population decline and low hatching rates, lethal laws protecting them against any dragons who would raise a hand against them… Drachlings are, indeed, beloved.

But the same cannot be said for our children. Those laws do not apply to humans. At all. There are no legal consequences for murdering humans, nor human children- and indeed, there are such deaths that are known to me. If a dragon were to kill any of mine and Ilah’s children, much as the very thought makes my heart seize, it would be entirely within their laws to do so, because our children are adopted, and human. And conversely, none of the laws of Omnoc and its territories lay any consequences for the murder of a dragon, including the children.

This needs to change. I can only hope it will at least be in Ilah’s lifetime, if not in mine.”

-Brigid of Fairview. Dated 100 years before the Crusaders’ War.

--

Sweating and exhausted, a gray-maned horse stumbled to a halt beneath a forest of tall pines. The figure atop him dismounted, slowly, wary of every movement even though no pursuit had managed to follow her.

Mu lurched when her feet hit the ground, dizzy and aching with the heat-pulse of pain in her arm that she’d gotten very familiar with over the past hours of riding flat out. She managed to at least loop the reins around a tree-branch, ensuring her ride didn’t leave without her.

Her bag hit the dirt, and she soon followed.

She simply sat for a while, arm wrapped in bloodied cloak, back against the tree, not knowing what to do. Then, feeling weak as a boiled noodle, Mu propped open Snatcher on her knees. Comfort in familiarity, and not being alone.

“-Stupid, I knew this was going to go wrong, reckless-!” The words dropped off, sudden as a cliffside chasm. “Is that blood?”

“Yeah. Sir Amos… had knives. And good aim,” she said simply.

Snatcher’s pages flapped helplessly, like a trapped bird, before scrawling out “Well, what are you waiting for? Get the field-healing kit the guard gave you!”

Oh. Of course. One handed, Mu dragged her knapsack closer, rifling through its contents until she unearthed a tiny steel box. Flipping it open, her eyes were immediately drawn to the roll of bandages, which meant… she needed to get her cloak out of the way.

Teeth gritted, Mu slowly pried the makeshift cloak-bandage away from the wound, choking back a hiss of pain as tacky blood-clots broke. Like peeling dried glue off her skin, but way worse.

It didn’t hurt as much to roll her sleeve up and hold her arms away from her body and rinse it out with water from her thankfully-full waterskin, but still enough to force a swear through her teeth.

Snatcher fidgeted, agitated and jittery letters in an uncomfortably familiar shade of red snapping across the page. “Show me.”

Wordlessly, Mu did.

“Did- did that go through your arm?” slashed across the page.

Two slices of weeping red, no more than two inches across, mirrored through her inner and outer arm- right between the two bones that twisted in a person’s lower arm. “Oh, it did,” she said numbly. No wonder the rust-stain it left on her cloak was so huge.

“You- listen. This is important. How many times is your heart beating? Give it forty seconds. And tell me if your skin feels cold.”

Very much not wanting to mess with her arm, Mu felt out the pulse point and relayed it to him, along with how she admittedly felt clammy and light.

“Okay, that’s… faster than it should be. Is it still bleeding?”

A glance down at her arm had Mu grimacing. “... Yeah.”

Silence, as parchment flickered with red, as if thinking, until that red coalesced into words. “Get out the needle-kit. This is going to be half-assed, but better than nothing.”

The thought of pushing needles through with her shock-shaky hands made Mu shudder, but she dug out the already-threaded curved needle and tiny steel flask of numbing vulnerary.

Bracing herself for what she would need to do, Mu dripped the cold liquid on both wounds, shivering as the prickle of numbness steadily increased, until it was a white-void gap in her senses. Propping Snatcher on the ground, she admitted “I’ve… sewn for clothes before. It can’t be that different.”

Though it was mostly meant for herself, Snatcher still emblazoned a response in bold letters. “It’s not the same! You need to be careful with- here, I’ll show you.” In unnerving blood-red lines, what looked like an arm divided laterally appeared on the page; the intent was clear, despite Snatcher’s terrible art skills, with fainter lines showing the layers of it. “You don’t want to stitch any deeper than this. And it should look like this.” The drawing vanished to be replaced by a diagonal slash across the page, and Mu’s stomach churned as the illustrated needle dipped into the skin-paper and tugged the edges closed. But she paid attention anyway.

Steadying her breath and hands, eyes flicking from the diagram to flesh, she pressed the point of the needle to her skin and allowed herself to wish for someone else to be here to do it for her. Pushed.

… It didn’t hurt. It still felt weird, a point of pressure felt in the muscle beneath but not the skin itself.

“Yeah, that’s exactly right, kid, keep going,” Snatcher said after she finished the first knot.

Her shaking hands steadied, somewhat, and she continued, one stitch at a time, no matter how nerve-crawlingly strange it felt. Did the same for the underside, grateful that her wavering fingers were steady enough to avoid piercing too deep into the more delicate skin.

Once she tied off the last passable knot and bandaged her arm, despite the lack of pain, Mu leaned back and tilted her head against the tree trunk, face prickling with cold sweat. Deep breaths. Tilted her head to where Snatcher sat.

“Now don’t you dare do something stupid and get hurt like that again!” Swam across the page, half-coherent with his thoughts. “I’m not going to lose another-” He stopped, words vanishing as if behind a stormcloud.

“Lose what?” Mu asked through her shaking exhale.

Bright red flashed across the paper, as if the dragon wrestled with his own thoughts, before finally settling on “It’d be boring, and I need you to get my body back, and-” Involuntarily, the words splayed across the page, wavering like water-running ink. “I’d miss you.”

Mu reached out with her good arm and grabbed the book, tugging it to rest on her legs. Carefully, as if they would flake away like dried blood, she brushed a finger over the words. They didn’t fade.

“I’d miss you.”

He meant it.

“I’d miss you too,” Mu said, and meant it just as much.

She slept curled up under her bedroll’s cover, next to the tree, with uncomfortably cold numbness still prickling at her arm and a book hugged to her chest. It rumbled a bit as she drifted off, warm and somehow almost feeling like one of the purring cats at the convent.

(Why did Snatcher know so much about humans anyway?)

--

The morning dawned bright, and achingly painful, and with something velvety tickling at Mu’s face.

Mu cracked open exhaustion-crusted eyes, glaring half-heartedly at the gray muzzle that lipped along her hair. “Go away. Dumb horse,” she slurred, rolling over and ow, ow, ow-

Mu rolled up and hissed, bedroll-cover and book falling away as she held her arm close. Ow.

… She should probably check on it. She really, really didn’t want to, but forced herself to look anyway. As she unwound the bandages, though, her grimace lightened. Despite the pain, it… didn’t look too bad. Small, now that the blood was gone and the neat seam of scabbing had formed. Still…

Almost morbidly, Mu positioned her lower arm to where it was when she got stabbed.

Right beneath the red line of the injury, her ribcage moved as she breathed, lungs inhaling chilly morning air and exhaling warmth.

The full reality washed over her with all the mercy of the tide. Mu was alone except for a soul-bound dragon and an animal. If the knife had been thrown a little sooner, if she’d moved a little slower…

I’d be dead, she thought. Ash-cold fact, wrapped in postponed dread. The Mafia would still be occupying her home, Snatcher would be without a body still, and nobody from the island would even know.

For all her bravado and sheer mule-headed stubbornness, it was scary how easy it was to kill and to die, out in the world alone.

Well, mostly alone. He might be in a weird shape, but Snatcher was still helping her, was still a person with her, who actually seemed to care.

Which all looped back around to the heavy feeling of there are people at home relying on me weighing on her back like storm-pressure. Even if the people back home didn’t know it. And… she wasn’t very far from the Gates of Paracos, in reality. She didn’t know if they would be mad enough at her to send a real search party.

So reluctantly, Mu grumped and groaned and ached her way into travel preparations; rolling up the bedroll, slinging the knapsack over the saddle horn-

Looking at the soft eyes of the horse, reins in hand, and realizing she had never ridden a horse in a way besides panicked galloping as she hung on to dear life, not even fully conscious.

Well, if she did it half-aware, surely it couldn’t be that hard now. Imitating her first desperate scramble, Mu hauled herself up on the stirrup. And froze, balanced in one stirrup and hissing as red sparks seized across her vision because pain, arm, ow.

The horse remained placid as a mountain lake as Mu slung herself ungainly across the saddle, finally settling with the reins in one hand and her bad arm resting in front of her. Actually, before moving on…

Mu flipped open Snatcher, resting him on the saddle horn. “Okay, we need to keep moving. What are our options? I don’t want those crazy captains to catch up.” A brief pause, as she remembered past conversations on the topic of travel routes. “And don’t just say ‘north’.”

“Okay, fine. We should go this way, then,” Snatcher said, map fading into existence and an arrow pointing directly north. “Or maybe… Nikolaos is that way, and flying there took me over…” The arrow spun to the left, pointing northwest.

“That’s still half the coastline,” Mu said plaintively, jabbing a finger at the coast in question. “Can you not narrow it down a little bit more?”

“Hey, we’re lucky I remembered more at all! At least I know my body is in one piece, so frankly you should take what you can get.”

Mu wanted to snark back, but… they’d had this conversation enough times. And every time, it never made the map any clearer despite Snatcher’s memories returning like greenery over old lava flows. “Fine,” she grumbled instead, and nudged the horse northwest.

(She kept Snatcher open on the saddle horn though- he liked to be able to see, especially the sky. There were bloodstains on his corners- rust-brown and old and not fading like his lurid red blood-ink did. Faintly, Mu recalled her wound dripping onto him as she attempted to follow the instructions with shaking hands.)

The patchy carpet of pine needles muffled the hoof-falls of her horse, and something about the gentle sway of its walk had Mu in a thinking mood. About the past, and the island- she hoped Luka was okay, and the Unsinkable’s captain, and the other kids at the convent, and the fishers and whalers that fed the Pelan people, and…

And she thought about the future. Where she’d go. What she’d do; after essentially re-conquering the island and making the Mafia bleed, she certainly had no intention of running the place. After all, the point was to put things back the way they used to be, were supposed to be.

‘The way things used to be’ also meant, well… Mu admitted to herself that she would, indeed, miss Snatcher. And he wouldn’t be sticking around, she knew- he’d repeatedly emphasized that he had better things to do.

Speaking of, though…

“Say, Snatcher,” Mu began, casual. “What exactly do you plan to do after we get rid of the Mafia?” “That’s none of your business,” arced across the page.

“Aw, c’mon, maybe I could help,” Mu cajoled.

“Unless you happen to know where any living dragons are hiding out, then I doubt it.”

“Living- you’re looking for somebody?” Mu asked, excitement fluttering in her gut. Which was then extinguished, because the likelihood of a dragon surviving the Crusaders’ War while staying on the continent itself was… low. Depressingly so. Unless they were trapped, like Snatcher was.

Paper creased like a scowl, until, visibly reluctantly, red spaced evenly across the pages. “Yes. My child.”

That was absolutely not what Mu was expecting. “You were a dad? I thought all the dragons were, well-”

“Am. I am a father!” exploded across Snatcher’s paper, bright and angry as cracks in cooling lava. “If they were- I would know. Even in the vault, I would.” Mu cringed at that desperate fury. Dragon parents were supposed to be some of the most protective parents in the world, and she could see what she’d read was right. “But, the war…”

“They can blend in with humans, and- Cam would never have let anything happen to them.” There’s that name again, Cam. Silence stretched like shadow, until “... Sorry. For yelling at you. It isn’t your fault.”

Mu neglected to mention that he couldn’t yell at all, and took the apology for what it was. “Eh, it’s forgiven,” she said instead. “And I’m sure you’ll find them someday, then, if you left them somewhere safe. And that they’ll be happy to see you.” She didn’t know what it was like to have parents, but Saints knew she missed her teachers back home, and it’d only been just over a month. Mu couldn’t imagine seven centuries.

“Yeah, if they even remember me,” grumbled across the page, billowing like stubborn storm clouds against a headwind. “Fifty year olds aren’t exactly known for their perfect memory.” His words spun onwards, stretching out like lowland mist, rather than bunched up like clouds. Almost contemplative. “Though maybe it’s better they don’t. Means they won’t remember their mother, at least.”

“Guessing that’s a bad thing?” Mu asked offhandedly.

Snatcher’s paper snapped decisively, his text visibly sarcastic. “Oh, for sure. Not a fate I’d wish on even my most spirits-cursed enemy.”

“Yikes.” Mu shivered. That was a hell of a condemnation; for it to be a good thing for a drachling not to remember their parent, and the strict laws around dragon children… Mu wasn’t stupid. She knew the reasons a lot of people ended up in the convent, both children and adults. “I mean, even if she doesn’t remember you, you’re still her dad, right? That has to count for something.” Needle-scented silence, as Mu muttered aloud before she could stop herself. “Kinda makes me wish I knew my parents, though.”

“You don’t remember them?”

“Nope. Freak sea-storm during fishing season. Their ship never made it back, but people saw the wreckage later.” Mu fidgeted with the corner of his paper, careful not to tear it. It felt… wrong, to be so frank about their deaths. But what she said earlier was true- she really didn’t remember them. “I wasn’t the only kid that the convent took in after that storm. But I was the youngest.”

Snatcher remained blank, as if thinking- paper-white, but for the red stains welling out from where Mu held his corners. Until, finally “I think they would have loved you. Should have, if they were smart enough to see they had a strong kid on their hands.”

Something like pride warmed in Mu’s chest, like finding a campfire laid and burning in the night. ”...Thanks, Snatcher. I think even if your kid forgot you, they’d still like you. You’re not bad, as far as dads can go, if you’re still looking for them after all this time.”

He didn’t write anything back to her. But the corners of his pages curled over her fingers, purposeful.

Chapter Text

“Though their natural decline was inevitable, the dragons adapted remarkably fast in the millenia before their downfall to compensate for their sharply-declining birth rate. A dragon may both sire and bear children, and socially it was accepted, and in fact was the norm, to mate with other dragons outside of their relationships, on the chance that such couplings would bear fruit. This is especially common for pairs consisting of two different clans- Earth and Divine Dragons, for example, cannot bear children with each other, and if they wish to hatch any eggs, they must lay with someone else.

This behavior even extends beyond other dragons- hybrids are known to exist, and given that dragonstones make it simple for a dragon to take a human-shaped form, it is more common than expected for a dragon to lay with a human (Though, from the people I’ve spoken to, it less often results in children and more in bruised feelings. Dragons’ romantic relationships are emotionally exclusive, if not physically. It is a strange thing, for us humans).

I’m rather glad Ilah informed me of this… cultural difference early on, so that we could talk about it- she knows most humans are monogamous, at least in this part of Omnoc. Saint Wisdom bless her, because otherwise those cases of bruised feelings would have certainly included me!”

-Brigid of Fairview.

--

(Snatcher was a book, and books could not do much.)

(He was a book, and he could not do much more than remember. Seven hundred and fifty years ago, a child ago, a war ago...)

--

Lukianos, the Soul-Snatcher, did not herald his arrival with the roaring call of a Fire Dragon trespassing into territory that was not his own, or the storm of dust blown up from his wings.

Instead he stood on two legs, and knocked on the door of the farmhouse with his human-shaped hand. Nervously, he fidgeted with the edges of his drawn hood- not that hiding his features would do much to make him blend in, really. Lukianos was well aware that whatever he was wearing was at least eighty years out of style.

It wasn’t necessary here, anyway. Just old habit, worn smooth by decades of poking his snout into human businesses and human places of learning. His friend knew what he was- had to, since she’d been the one to see a Fire Dragon eyeing her sheep from across the territory-line a little bit too hungrily, and proceeded to throw dirt-clods and insults at his face.

When he snarled at her, low and mountain-deep, she’d just started swearing at him.

Naturally, she was the best friend he’d had in all 1,300 years of his life. Which was why she was the first person he felt he could trust with this.

Lukianos shoved such thoughts away as the door cracked open, illuminating a freckled face and green eyes.

That face exploded into a grin as Camellia tugged open the door further, the setting sun behind Lukianos seemingly lighting her red hair aflame. “Luke! This is a surprise!”

“I told you, that’s not my name,” Lukianos protested grumpily.

Camellia simply rolled her eyes in response, adopting an overly-formal monotone and stiffened spine. “Oh, my apologies, Lawkeeper Lukianos, the Soul-Snatcher.”

… In retrospect, he set himself up for that one. “How do you manage to make my actual titles sound like an insult?”

“It’s a talent,” Camellia said primly. “But really, this isn’t the usual time for you to drop by. Is something up?”

“Yes, uh- kinda,” Lukianos finished lamely. “It’s not a bad thing! Just… not a conversation to have with your family inside, where they can overhear.”

Camellia eyed him suspiciously, but stepped out of the farmhouse anyways. “Let’s take it to the barn, then.”

The barn Camellia’s family used for their flock was somehow even messier than Lukianos remembered- hay stuffed so tightly in the loft he wondered when it would come toppling down, chipped paint peeling down the boards, straw spilling out from the pens.

The sheep in their pens bleated and rolled their eyes until they showed white with fear as Camellia led Lukianos to a farther corner. “So, what’s going on that you don’t want anybody overhearing?” Camellia asked, attempting for casual but coming out as extremely worried, as she fell back to sit on a straw-bale behind her.

Lukianos had thought of what he would say, each word precise, on his flight to the farming village of Nikolaos where his friend lived. But as he looked at her, those carefully-planned words scattered like feathers in the wind.

He sank to the ground, sitting on the straw-covered floor in front of her. Normally he’d sit beside her, but, well… Humans might signal differently than dragons did, but he was about to ask a very, very weighty favor of her; and while to dragons it would be of no consequence, Lukianos knew how significant such things were to humans. “I… Ven and I have been talking. She very much wants a child. And since we can’t have children between ourselves…” Lukianos shrugged away his nerves. “There are no other Fire Dragons in the territory, and Ven said she’d never mate with another Ice Dragon, so-” Deep breath. Careful, calm. “-So I’m asking for your help, on this.”

“Oh…” And then, realization, seeping from Camellia’s voice like meltwater. “Oh.”

“It’s- practical, too. We know each other, and since you’re human there’s a higher chance of success because infertility isn’t as much of an issue for you- um, unless something changed after you transitioned-”

“Slow down, dude. Give me a minute” Camellia waved him down with both her hands, before sighing. “First off, if you and Ven need a donor, I can help. But… I need to think on some stuff first. Like…” She drifted off, brow scrunched in concentration. Lukianos did his best not to interrupt as she was thinking. “Like, if this works, you and Venka will be the one raising them… I still want to be involved, some. Introduce them to my family.” Then, softly, with all of the gravity of the situation, she continued. “They’ll be human too.”

Lukianos was… stunned, for the most part. Hybrids weren’t exactly common, but they were known to dragon society, especially as the draconic population revealed itself to be barren more often than not. They inherited the lifespan of their draconic parent, which meant… “But- are you sure? Dragons take a long time to grow up.” They wouldn’t even remember you. Human lives were so… fleeting. Like the skirling eddies of glacier-melt rivers, there and gone as the world froze with each turn.

“So just keep bringing them here. Even after I’m gone.” Camellia shrugged. “Even if they don’t remember me- I have a big family. They’ll always have someone here.”

“You’re right. They will be human,” Lukianos whispered softly. And then smacked his palm into his face. “Ugh, why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you’re always too caught up in the wording of everything,” Camellia shot back without missing a beat. Plucked strands of hay from the bale she sat on, one by one, eyes never leaving his. “Although, I have to ask- you said Venka wanted kids. What about you?”

It was easier to hide his grimace behind a blank human face, without wings or tail or mane of quills to reveal his feelings. But not by much. He pulled the corner of his mouth into a grin, only half sarcastic. “Come on, do you even need to ask? Every dragon these days wants children.”

And for the most part, they did. Venka certainly did. Lukianos… was less sure. Humans and dragons edged closer and closer together as humans spread and dragons… didn’t; but still, despite their dwindling population, they tried to hold all their territory. The results had been… explosive. The threat of widespread conflict was heavy enough that Lukianos had met with his fellow lawkeepers often, as did Venka with her father, the Ice Dragons’ chief. It was not the place to raise an infant drachling. He wouldn’t even know what to do with a drachling regardless of the looming threat of war.

Raising the child would mostly be Ven’s job- she’d been quite vocal on the topic of it. A union of opposites, an heir, a proof of love. The thought clearly drove her like the storm did the waves, and though he hadn’t agreed at first, she’d been quite… adamant in convincing him.

(She apologized after, saying she didn’t mean to. Licked at his brow-scales. He tried not to tense as he curled around her in their nest that night, her snout pressed tenderly to his pulse-point.)

She was right, anyway. She always was.

It must have been enough for Camellia, because she dropped it, instead shredding yet more straw in her hands. “So, uh. How does this whole thing work, like…” she said, and proceeded to sketch out a rather… suggestive gesture.

Lukianos buried his head in his hands in order to hide his blush. Just because these arrangements were encouraged and extraordinarily common didn’t mean you could just… draw them out in public like that!

“Oh, come on, I can see the tips of your ears- it’s not that embarrassing, is it? I thought this was normal for dragons!”

He’d never been any good at hiding anything from Camellia.

--

(Venka was ecstatic when he finally arrived with the news of a drachling on the way. She took great pride in constructing a nest herself; once the egg was laid, though she could not brood over a Fire Dragon’s egg with her cool temperatures, she still tucked herself down to eye-level with the egg, crooning sweet clicks and trills to it so that it would hatch knowing her voice. It was, admittedly, incredibly adorable.

Lukianos was still happy to be off the damn thing once it started to hatch, though.

Each pip of the egg tooth had Venka utterly enraptured, and once the drachling spilled out of the egg she dove toward it, licking fiercely, until-

“... Lukianos, why- they look so odd, and they smell…” An inhale so deep it rocked the shattered remains of eggshell. “Human.”

“Yes, yes, there are no Fire Dragons in the area so I had to improvise-” Lukianos responded, eager to get out of the den and hunt and patrol their territory now that the whole event was over-

“You- you laid with someone else! A human?!” Venka roared, shock and hurt and rage keening through air and stone.

I don’t understand, what is she so angry about? “You- of course I did! You wanted a child, and I gave you a child!”

“Our child! It was supposed to be ours!”

Wings tented, Lukianos tossed his head in exasperation. “You didn’t seriously think I just laid a literal impossibility in that nest, did you? Come on!”

“You…” Venka’s eyes were slits, her fins flared wide. “You harlot! You betrayed me, and have the gall to act like this is my fault?!”

Her fury glanced toward the drachling still attempting to wobble to their feet in the nest, and her snarls wisped out as clouds of frost.

Lukianos’s vision narrowed to a point of white and red and wrath as thunderous as a dying mountain.

No.

Venka inhaled, an icestorm spiraling around her snout.

No!

Lukianos flared the vents on his neck. Expanded his mane of quills. Tugged the oxygen in the den to him, air sucked down in a heated howl.

There was no such thing as only fire. But a truly desperate Fire Dragon was what came the closest to it.)

(Venka conceded, torn down in her own den. Lukianos was free to do what he wished with his child, a privilege earned from one desperate firestorm and the threat of informing the lawkeepers if she didn’t leave the drachling unharmed; he reassured her that he truly did love her, and that’s why he stayed and kept his mouth shut about her near-successful crime.

Lukianos was the one who hunted for the drachling- Halcyone. Chewed the tough meat for them, groomed their still-soft quills into alignment, slept with them tucked under his wing, encouraged their instincts by letting them play-fight and win against him while he was in his squishy humanoid form.

Venka was out of the den more often than not, these days. As if she couldn’t bear to look at them. But when she did… it rattled the spines along Lukianos’s back.)

(Tacitus the Immovable rallied the other chiefs to his side after the death of his father, just as the humans forged yet more alliance between their cities and noble families; war swept across the continent on wings of salt and acrid smoke.

Tempus the Incandescent’s betrayal was a shock, like boiling water on snow. And even more dire was the pact she forged- or rather, the pacts. Tempus linked her blood to not one, but twelve humans, all of whom could now wield the Divine Dragon pact-spell at their leisure.

With them- the Crusaders, the humans called them- the outcome of the war became far less certain. Even The Immovable fell to the star-touched power of Narga, before his cousin could channel his soul back into his prematurely-slain body.

(Lukianos wondered if perhaps he would have to beg quarter and secrecy from Camellia and her family, rather than the other way around.)

After the Crusaders, and Tempus, and the canny commanders that seemed to grow like wheat among the humans… things became more desperate.

Lawkeepers were meant to judge from afar. Manage the internal affairs. But Lukianos and Venka were both called to battle- Venka, to fight by her father’s side against the Omnecian navy as it slipped in to Ice Dragon territory by way of sea, and Lukianos, to carry movements and messages on the swift wings and deep stamina of a Fire Dragon.

Every time he and Venka were called to contribute, Lukianos left Halcyone with Camellia- her family had taken surprisingly well to a dog-sized drachling rolling around in the grass with their older children. Nikolaos had no intention of getting involved in the Crusaders’ War. They would be safe here, Camellia told him.

He still worried. About Halcyone, and… about Venka. He did not truly fight at her side- Ice Dragons were adapted to the northern coasts, thick scale-coated blubber and serrated teeth and freezing breath making them true terrors to any enemy that might sail into cold waters.

Needless to say, Fire Dragons did not do as well in such environments. So Lukianos watched from above, or strafed fire at a few galleons that decided to get cheeky and skip around the glacier-traps the Ice Dragons laid. And what he saw, perched among the other Ice Dragons after the battle like a sun-shadow among moons… worried him.

As the last of the human ships retreated, leaving behind the ones ground into splinters by glaciers, one of Venka’s cousins waded through cold waves towards her. Gently smacked her shoulder with his tail, in a common show of camaraderie among Ice Dragons.

Venka turned on her cousin, sweeping him off his feet and pinning him by the throat beneath the surf.

As she was dragged off by two of the other dragons nearby, shrieking invectives of “How dare you!”, Lukianos realized this was no simple battle-fury continuing to flow even after the fighting was over.

In the years after, Venka did not lose her fury off the battlefield. It worsened. Even long before Halcyone’s hatching, he and Venka could compromise- he forwent his favorite meat, and she murmured her love to him in his ear. He did not speak with other dragons without her, and she allowed him to claw-mark and patrol their territory on his own.

There were no compromises now. Only ultimatums.

But it wasn’t enough to know. Lukianos dearly wished the degeneration that had begun to plague their kind had spared her. He had to be sure.

But beyond that violent outburst toward her cousin, she… wasn’t all that different. So Lukianos waited, and fulfilled his duties to his love, and to his child, and to his station as a lawkeeper.

And to his people; called to take the field once more, Lukianos was to be sent all the way down to southern Omnoc. Venka would be staying north, as would his child.

But still, but still, but still, some scale-solid instinct in the back of his mind told him leaving Halcyone anywhere that Venka could touch them was courting blood and disaster. Hastily, he guided their magic and bound their power to their dragonstone- young, so very young, he hadn’t created his until he was five hundred, and they were only fifty- and flew to Nikolaos. He handed off a sleepy human-shaped drachling to Camellia, telling her he’d be gone for a bit longer this time, that the Crusaders’ War would take him much further south this time.

She told him to keep himself safe, damn what others expected of him.)

(Lukianos returned from that battle aching- though it had been patched and tended to by the healers, the ballista-wound at the meat of his foreleg still tore with fire at every movement. He just wanted to be home, and curl up at his love’s cool flanks. Halcyone would be fine at Camellia’s for a few more nights.

He churred at the entrance to the great cavern, his calls echoing off the stone. Venka’s returning trills invited him in sweetly, and gratefully he followed their gentle notes into their den.

“You did not bring the child with you?” she asked, long fins pricking forth in curiosity.

“Urgh, no.” Lukianos sat heavily, picking out ballista-splinters from between his toes with his teeth- stepping on the damned machine was messy, certainly, but satisfying. “The Immovable ran us all ragged, trying to keep up with his first battle after resurrection. I’d just like to sleep for a week, really.”

“Oh, if they’re with that woman, then…” Venka slunk toward him, her cheek gliding against his. “Then it’s just us, hmm?”

A flash of blue and green scales like a striking viper, his back to the stone floor, her bulk atop him, one claw gripping his snout and the other on his neck, no air, no air, he couldn’t breathe-

“I’ve been hoping you would come back to me soon, my love.” Venka’s red eyes loomed above him like moons. “You are never going to abandon me again. We’ll be together for eternity.”

Behind Venka’s head. Above them, and how did Lukianos miss them-

Chains. Heavy, exactly like the thick chains humans used for their siege engines, and bolted to the high walls.

The weight on his throat increased-

Black.)

(Halcyone- he missed so much of their life. Would they even want him in it, once he finally found them? Did they resent him for abandoning them the same way he felt guilty for doing so?

Because he loved them, even seven hundred years and an endless imprisonment later. He’d carried the egg and brooded over it until it hatched and named them and fed them and cared for them and even within just those brief fifty years he’d known he could never, ever regret Halcyone, even if he regretted the hows and the whys and the whens.

He was supposed to be someone they could look to for love, and protection. Both of them. But he could do nothing, trapped in a book, forced into passivity, when he was supposed to be wings and fire able to strike at what would harm them until there were not even ashes left-

Snatcher hated being a book.)

--

Muriel absently flipped the corners of his pages like a deck of cards. He didn’t particularly mind. It seemed to settle her somewhat, and he appreciated that being propped open all the time meant he could see everything.

Including her arm, still held loosely in the crook between her and the saddle horn.

The escape from the Gates of Paracos, admittedly, rattled him. The blood, the fear he felt not for himself but for Muriel, the helpless feeling of her blood staining his paper…

Knowing and being forced to admit were quite different things. And Lukianos both knew and was forced to admit to himself that he cared about her. Which was risky. Very, very risky, because he already had a priority to Halcyone, and his future search for them. Humans were so very short lived, there and gone and loved and grieved in what was only a fraction of a draconic lifespan.

And it was a painfully familiar feeling. As such, he wondered if the little human somehow took Halcyone’s place. If all this was just lingering nesting hormones looking for a replacement for what was lost.

A thought and a memory sparked, sounding suspiciously like Camellia. “You can’t be a substitute for someone else, or take their place. That’s not how loving people works.”

Damn it.

Drachlings- and human children, as he understood- needed to be able to to rely on their guardians. And trust them. Snatcher… qualified for neither. The only protection he could offer was advice, and as for trust-

He’d already failed to be someone she could trust, right from the moment his blood dropped from his pages into her hand.

She deserved the truth. She was his student, she actively looked to him for guidance now. But he kept... putting it off, swearing he’d tell her about the blood when the time was right.

Who was he kidding. Snatcher would rather dunk his head in salted ice-slush than tell her. Disappoint her, betray her; another disappointment and another betrayal, like abandoning Halcyone to fight a losing war.

Snatcher worried at his pages the same way a human might chew at the end of a pen as he fretted. Trust, and the uneven balance of their deal, given the very nature of blood-pacts between humans and dragons…

He had to balance the scales somehow. Dragons were territorial. Dragons were also social. For them, trust, real trust, was the knowledge that one close to you could harm you, but knowing they would not. Like Snatcher would never do that to Muriel, even if it was a choice between death and silencing her free will-

(Like Venka did to him, like the laws expressly forbid.)

-He would take death.

Trust. Putting a knife in someone’s hands while you yourself are unarmed.

“Hey, kid, pull this creature over. There’s something you need to know.”

Chapter Text

Decree of Banishment

Until subsequent review, with exemptions only to be given under authority of the Crown, the following parties are hereby stripped of all titles and holdings, and exiled from all lands under the dominion of the Omnecian Empire:

-Luka Pryce

The party has been found in open contempt of contract with the Crown. He is to submit himself to removal from all Omnecian lands, and refusal to do so shall be considered an act of deliberate hostility and met with a sufficient display of lawful force.

Signed,

Her Imperial Majesty Eilwyn Paracos, Queen of Omnoc.

--

Valflame.

That was the name of the pact-spell.

Mu was under the impression that he wasn’t going to teach it to her until he was back in his body. He said it was just that they were already halfway there anyway, but…

“You’re like a lodestone for trouble, kid. The Gates- look. Clearly, in order to protect yourself, you’re going to have to be the scariest thing in the room.” Dark words had bloomed across the page, arced and spiked in ways that evoked tented wings and erect spines and bared teeth. “Like a dragon.”

The spell that spun across Snatcher’s paper was unlike anything Mu had ever seen- triangular formulas where any other spell favored circles, summoning magic rather than expelling, runes that she didn’t remember learning but understood nonetheless-

Mu got the impression that she wouldn’t have been able to decipher a single line of it before she made the pact with Snatcher.

And it felt- warm. Like summer winds.

Or maybe the warmth was the fact that he’d trusted her with it. She had no intention of tossing him and running back home to get rid of the Mafia herself. But the point, she felt, was that she could, but wouldn’t.

“Thanks, Snatcher,” Mu grinned, turning the spell over in her mind like coals in a forge. “At least this way I can get rid of the Mafia myself, and you can go off and look for your kid.”

“... Not necessarily.”

Spell-coals were doused with those words. “Huh?”

“I’d help you get rid of them even if I wasn’t contractually obligated to.” Stubborn, bold words, like red-hot iron. “So even if you could destroy them yourself, you don’t have to.”

… Oh.

Luka had told her, a long time ago and with a ghost-haunted look, that love wasn’t about fickle affection, or keeping someone close at hand. It was about giving the people important to you what they need. Like teachers did to students. Like anyone did to those who were bound to them by ties of kin-and-heart.

Like parents did to children.

Like an offer to fight her battles for her, bloodying claws already stained by a war he hadn’t even wanted to fight in.

Heart burning, Mu hugged Snatcher to her chest. He was just paper and leather and blood, but for a bit-

It almost felt like hugging Luka did, that last smoke-scented day on the island.

I think I love you like the way guardians are supposed to be loved by their wards, Mu thought. But instead she said, voice thick “Thanks, Snatcher.”

Carefully she set him back down, propped on the pommel, but wasn’t able to hide her hiss as something pulled in her bad arm. Ah, shit.

“You- what was that.” Paper wrinkled as if scowling. “Muriel. When was the last time you checked the bandages?”

Heartwarming moment over. “Uh… a few days ago.”

Snatcher scribbled illegibly, worried arcs and sharp spikes that seemed to bleed on the edges. Sighing, Mu unwrapped the bandages, grimacing in pain. And then grimaced for another reason. I… don’t think it’s supposed to look like that.

Edged in angry red that had somehow spread even further since the actual day of the injury, the stitches still held fast, but the skin around them was visibly swollen. And hot to the touch, Mu realized, as she gingerly brushed her finger around the entry wound. “That… looks infected.”

“Spirits, it is. Something must have gotten in the wound…” Snatcher flickered his corners, fidgeting in clear worry.

Mu winced, remembering that she’d staunched the bleeding with her cloak during her desperate escape. Her cloak, which she’d worn for the entire journey, across half the continent. “We… I don’t have anything for this,” Mu realized aloud, misty panic closing her throat. People died from infected wounds without a healer, out at sea with no staves and no mages, seawater with all its invisible little lives eating sores into exposed wounds-

“We need to find a healer then. Stay calm.” Snatcher’s words were huge, blocky, and deliberately attention-grabbing. “Given the summer earth-turns, and the stars… we’re here.” Lines and dots faded into view, redder than the cuts on her arm. “I don’t know how much has changed over the centuries, but either way, the closest city is Alces, about two days away.”

Two days. She could do that. “So much for avoiding towns…”

Two days of travel. It would be nothing, in the face of the month past.

--

Mu ached, all over. Dull and gray-feeling, down to her bones. Some of it was the horseback riding. The rest of it… probably infection. It wasn’t fun- quite painful actually, like trees groaning in the hurricane’s leading winds- but she wasn't delirious. And the cuts didn’t stink of black-rot.

As far as positives went, they weren’t the greatest, Mu admitted to herself.

“We should almost be there,” Snatcher said. “Keep Horf at the same pace and we’ll be in Alces by midday.”

“I cannot believe you’re still on that,” Mu groaned. It wasn’t an unfamiliar tactic- annoyed people, on the whole, tended to be conscious people- but it was still infuriating how he was never going to drop it. “His name is just Horse, I was slurring my words because I was tired!”

“Nope, still Horf.” Impossibly smug. Mu rolled her eyes, resolving to ignore him as Horse crested the hill.

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t. You hate the truth, and the truth is that his name is- what are you staring at out there?”

Wordlessly, she held him open, the full face of his pages taking in the sight before them.

Snowswept spires of stone and copper, almost cloud-piercing at their highest points. Gray walls that appeared low compared to the stretching towers of the city center, but Mu knew, intellectually, that they were taller than the high tide-lines back home. It was… quite pretty, actually. Like an enormous grayed upscale of the convent back home.

The manned ballistae on the parapets were less reassuring.

Which… okay, they were in Omnoc. Everywhere here had some kind of military presence. But it still stood as a stark difference to the island, fortified only by a small militia, the ship-breaking hurricanes of autumn, and the mages of the convent (even then, few of those mages were battle-trained, and they paid dearly for it. A rare few had martial training, true, but the majority were monks or scholars or children).

“That’s… a lot bigger than it used to be.” Snatcher’s words were small, as if even the old dragon felt dwarfed by the city’s size.

No kidding. Her hometown could probably fit in there five times over. “At least that means we’ll find a healer. And it’ll be easier to blend in, right?”

“Hmm, you may have a point there. I don’t know about now, but humans in big cities are all about getting their own stuff done. They didn’t even notice dragons walking among them!” Rustling paper seemed to cackle.

“Wait, you- in a human city?” Mu asked, incredulous.

“Dragonstones make us very human-shaped, kid. Although, gotta say, we still look different enough that I’m surprised nobody in the old Alces noticed. Or maybe they just didn’t care.” Pages flicked and wrinkled in a shrug. “Doesn’t matter much these days, anyway. What’s important is that so long as you don’t stir up trouble, nobody will give you any grief.”

“I sure hope you're right…” Because Mu was an obviously-foreign teenager traveling alone, injured, and on a stolen horse. Being noticed would be a terrible idea. One that probably would end in explosions and a body count, given her past track records.

And explosions in the middle of a city center would be… not great. For everyone involved. Those people weren’t Mafia goons or highway robbers or paranoid guard captains, they didn’t deserve her fire.

Also, given the guard presence, Mu was a fan of being alive.

Blending in it was.

--

The guard waved her on through, dirty horse and ragged clothes and Snatcher tucked in the back of her sash and all. He looked bored, even.

Before he could finish waving her through, Mu leaned down, careful not to overbalance and fall off Horf. “Say, uh, Mr. Guard. Do you know where I could find a healer?”

His eyebrow crooked in a distinctive ‘I have better things to do’ arc, but he lazily jabbed a thumb into the city center, where towers sprouted like trees. “Zenith does free healings for their students to practice on, so long as you don’t mind being their testing grounds.”

Given the state of her coinpurse after the last few food restocks? Free was about all Mu could afford. “Thanks,” she called behind her, even as the guard ignored her in favor of getting the rest of the travelers entering Alces to hurry it up.

Nobody really paid them any mind as Mu nudged Horf onto the side of the main road towards the school- and wasn’t that strange, that the city was so sprawling and travelers so common that there were different sides for people on foot and for people on mounts? The Zenith School of Magic seemed to loom like a gray storm-pillar, old and wind-worn and stubborn as the people who were, in Mu’s opinion, insane for living where it got so cold in winter.

Once they reached the foot of the fortress-school they found it much more inviting.

The courtyard, dotted with tents and fenced-off practice ranges, was not a swarm of harried cityfolk like the packed main roads. Rather, people spun like fish in the currents, flitting from one place to another. Students and instructors talked. Magic boomed from the practice ranges- and Mu did her best to ignore the temptation to join in. Despite the assumption Sar Cato made, she wasn’t actually here to get her Sage accreditation.

As for healing… the tent with Saint Mercy’s device stitched into it seemed like a good start.

After dismounting and jabbing a finger at Horf to order him to stay, Mu tentatively poked her head through the tent-flap.

Both the dark-robed Druid and the much younger Cleric apprentice jerked their heads up to stare. Stools lined the side of a table, and the white-robed student sat on one, fidgeting with the handles of a tiny chest’s drawers.

“Um… I was told there was healing here?” Mu asked nervously.

“Hm, looks like you’ll get your practice in after all today, Timmy,” the Druid hummed, beckoning Mu over to sit on one of the stools. Despite his hooded face, she found his presence made her relax, somewhat. The odd rhythmic lilt to his accent and Druid’s robes reminded her of Luka. “What ails you?”

Gingerly, Mu sat, letting the ache sink her into the wooden stool. Rolled back her sleeve, and unwrapped the bandage. And cringed at the low hiss from Timmy, because that was not something you wanted your healer to do when they saw an injury.

“Yeesh, okay, that’s not great.” Timmy grasped her wrist gently, and Mu allowed him to stretch her arm out and facing up, even as she grimaced at the movement. “Oooh, stabbed all the way through- Uncle, I think I might need help for this?”

“Hmm.” The Druid stooped over like a vulture, gently prodding Mu’s arm and ignoring her bit-lip hiss of pain. “Certainly infected- doubtless the ligaments also suffered quite a bit of damage. Make a fist, child.”

It was far more difficult than Mu expected to ball her hand into a weak fist, concerningly so. “Ah, yes, this type of muscle damage is beyond your training at the moment, Timmy. I will take care of that part. Although I must ask-'' The Druid cast a critical eye over the injury. “-Who in the name of Saint Mercy did your stitches? They’re atrocious.”

Mu bristled. She- Snatcher had done his best, and so had she. “I did.”

One dark eyebrow arced beneath his hood. “Oh? Well, it could be worse, I suppose.” He backed away, slowly ambling to the tent-flap. “Remove the stitches and clear the infection while I retrieve more suitable staves- and only that, Timmy, understand?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Timmy grumbled at his uncle’s retreating back, fishing through a partitioned box and retrieving the tiniest set of scissors Mu had ever seen. “So, okay, you’re obviously not from here, so what brought you to Alces? Tourism? The school?” he asked conversationally, only half-looking at the scissor points he held over the candle-flame on the table to their side.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Mu said, tilting her head up and away- in dismissal, and not to avoid looking at the cut threads as Timmy slid them out of her skin. Nope.

“Yeesh, I was just asking.” Then, under his breath as he burned the stitching threads- “Bet you’re one of the idiots who’re snooping around about dragons.”

Mu pounced. “Dragons? Do you know anything?” Wait, he made it sound like a regular occurrence… “Hold on, why are people asking about dragons?”

“The money, duh.” At Mu’s confused look he elaborated. “Y’know, the princess’s bounty out on dragon-related stuff? It’s a lot of gold on the line.”

“... Weird,” Mu finally said. “What would a princess want with dragon stuff?”

Timmy shrugged helplessly. “I dunno. Nobles are all weird, far as I’m concerned. But Princess Vanessa was always, y’know-” He spun his finger by his head. “A bit strange since she had her fiance killed.”

“Had him killed?” Yeesh, weird is the nicest way to put it, in that case.

“Eh, exiled, technically, but exiled in winter? Basically a death sentence anyway.” Timmy fidgeted with the stone of his Mend staff. “‘S all people would talk about for years, since the guy was studying here when it happened. I know Lord Luka was one of Dad’s favorite students, so he was pretty bummed about the whole thing.”

The name caught her off guard, but, well, her Luka had a weird accent that was way too similar to Timmy’s for it not to be a coincidence. Must be a common name in this part of the world.

Mu snorted. “Yeah, I’m not looking for dragon-related stuff for the princess, for sure. Definitely not someone I want to mess with.”

“Hah! Then you’re smarter than half the guys who come through here asking about Zenith’s long and storied history with the wyrmfolk!” Timmy swung his staff like a conductor’s baton, emphasizing his playfully flowery language.

Mu couldn’t help but snort and roll her eyes at his antics. “I’m still interested in anything you have on dragons, though.”

“Hmm.” Timmy tapped the staff to his chin thoughtfully. And then suddenly remembered why he had it in the first place, the familiar hot prickle of healing magic sparking white in Mu’s vision as he cleared the infection out with the staff’s magic. “Right, just hold your arm still- and, well, it’s not exactly dragons, but… There’s a really damn weird mountain in the nearby range. Like, nobody ever makes it up the slope, they all get turned around. Except one guy- senior student here, boy Dad was pissed- brought a whole quiver of Restore staves and cast them on himself constantly, which is, y’know, super dumb-”

Mu smacked her good hand into her face, exasperated. She’d be better off asking around whatever Omnecian cities had instead of public docks. “Okay, what does this have to do with dragons?” she sighed, dragging her fingers down her face.

“Sheesh, I was getting to that,” Timmy complained, finally letting go of Mu’s arm. “Guy never made it all the way up to the top before he ran out of Restores, because those things cost a fortune, but he did find something.” Gleefully, Timmy hooked his fingers into talons. “He swears he found clawmarks on the stone, big ones. Like, big enough to pick up and carry a wagon huge.”

There was no way any normal creature could leave scours on a mountain like that. “Where exactly is this mountain?”

Timmy grinned at her in a way that made Mu feel vaguely like a fish on a baited hook. “It’s a slog on foot, but if you ride, it’s only just under a week away. Twilight Mountain, supposed to look like a weird bell.” He clapped his hands together, eyes bright. “So! All we have to do is head out the north gate, and follow the main road for-”

“‘We’?”

Mu startled as a shadow eclipsed the tent entrance, looming like Death did over doomed beds.

“... Um. Hi, Uncle.” Timmy slumped, before turning his pleading gaze to Mu in a clear cry for help.

Which Mu acknowledged with a solemn nod… and promptly ignored. “There is no ‘we’, sir. Just me.”

“Wise decision. Wiser than some young Clerics, who continually test my ability to keep my promise to his father to keep him safe.” Pointedly, Timmy’s uncle did not look at his nephew, for all that it was obvious he was reprimanding him. “Now, for your injury, which is what I assume you came here for, rather than the outlandish gossip Her Highness has been encouraging.”

… Right. Mu allowed the Druid closer, his grip on her arm surprisingly gentle as he stretched it out once more. She winced as his fingers prodded around the wounds, but otherwise bit her lip in silence. “Hm, yes, no wonder you’re having trouble moving your hand and arm.” He peered at her through his hood as he retrieved a Mend staff from his robes. “Your muscles will be shifted slightly, and then healed- it will hurt, so do try and stay still.”

“Can’t be any worse than the actual knife,” Mu shrugged, trying for nonchalant.

Mu could see nothing behind the shadow of the Druid’s cowl, but she still got the impression that he was smiling at her. “Indeed.”

Mu grit her teeth as the ice-sharp prickle of deeper healing magic sparked over her- and sighed, once the Druid was done. Almost wonderingly, she fisted and unfisted her hand, rotating her wrist around like she was using a mixing bowl. “... Huh. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” the Druid said smugly. “There is a reason Zenith is so renowned. Now, be on your way.”

“Thank you.” Mu hopped off the bench, feeling fatigued but lighter, like a soaked book set out to dry in the sun. “No offense, but I hope I never have to see you again.”

“None taken. Although I would have liked to hang out and go to the mountain. Traitor.” Timmy spat a raspberry at her, still teasing despite the genuine disappointment.

“Very mature,” Mu countered primly. And then, soon as the Druid’s back was turned while he puttered around the drawers, she flicked a gesture at him that she’d seen the sailors brandish at each other across the docks.

Despite not knowing what it meant, Timmy had the wherewithal to look offended.

Mind consumed with thoughts of dragons and cursed mountains and Omnecian nobles, Mu retrieved Horf, nudged him down the main north road-

And vanished into the nearest unoccupied alleyway.

Though wide and open enough to allow the sun to dapple the cobblestones, the alleyway was blessedly empty- set between the fancier shops, the kind that didn’t open until later in the day. Just in case, Mu paced Horf up and down the length of it before taking out Snatcher- she was better off being extra careful, after what she’d just learned.

After craning her neck and squinting at any weird shadows from her perch atop Horf, Mu retrieved Snatcher and cracked him open for the first time since entering the city. “So, you heard all that. What do you think?”

“... I think it’s a dragon’s mountain,” Snatcher said plainly. “We won’t know for sure until we see the territory-marks, but not much else can get as big as that human described.” Demonstratively, three thick lines sliced across his page, the red ink and pale parchment lending it an unnerving resemblance to an open wound.

“He said it was north, too, so it should be in the right place. Maybe it’s where your body is?” Mu strummed her fingers across his page-edges in thought. “I wonder what’s up with whatever weird thing is keeping people off the mountain, though- is that some kind of, I dunno, weird dragon magic you could have done before you died?”

“... I don’t know. It might not have even been me who put it up,” Snatcher admitted, text small and reluctant. “Stuck in a box for seven centuries, remember? Not exactly favorable conditions for perfect memory.” The sheer intensity of the emphasized words startled Mu, as if they’d been written in dark venom; she knew he resented his failing memories, but there was the hint of something else there.

“Speaking of that…” Snatcher’s words seemed shaded, as if hung beneath the eaves of a sun-beaten cliff. Or inside a pitch-dark room. “We need to be really, really sure to avoid this Princess Vanessa. I could still hear some things through the vault walls, and remember what those goons said?”

Mu’s memories of that particular moment of chaos were hazed and unclear, like mist on the ocean, but the pieces still clicked together like beads on an abacus.

Blood-magic being smuggled into the palace, to the point that the queen herself instituted a merciless blockade. The Mafia attempting to break into the vault because a rich noble in Omnoc was paying an exorbitant weight of gold for the contents. The Crown Princess of Omnoc and her bounty on anything related to dragons.

“Sweet Saints, you think the one who paid the Mafia to steal from- and the blood-magic smuggling problem- it’s her? You’re sure?” Oh, but it fit far too well.

“Don’t ever be sure of something you can’t confirm yourself,” Snatcher admonished, repeating one of the old adages he’d written to her as he taught her the philosophies of magic and combat- at least, a dragon’s philosophies. Some things didn’t translate well, but this particular methodology was not one of them. “But yes, I think there’s a good chance. Not much else makes sense.”

Mu thought about what would have happened if she hadn’t dragon-napped Snatcher, and was left weaponless against the Mafia. Thought about what could happen, if she was caught with blood-magic in the princess’s realm.

And then shivered, because another ugly, suspicious thought crawled through her mind like so much inexorable lava. “Snatcher? What do you think she wants with dragons?”

“... I don’t know, kid. But anything a human princess wants with dragons can’t be something we want to get mixed up in.”

Chapter Text

Tempus the Incandescent,

Though I write this with human-shaped hands, it is with great mourning that I must inform you of my conclusions.

Though the use of dragonstones is historically more one of convenience for those who wished to touch the worlds of humans, your hypothesis that sealing parts of ourselves and our power into the stones might stave off the degeneration while we searched for a cause and a cure had merit- but alas, it is but a temporary measure.

Creating and using dragonstones disrupts the madness’s hold on the blood, and thus the soul, by binding that blood to a focus that cannot be corrupted by the madness, as it is inanimate. However, it does not cure the degeneration- indeed, if a dragon with a dragonstone is ‘infected’, it will continue to progress until there is nothing but foaming madness left. A preventative only, and not a cure.

We could, perhaps, save ourselves yet, if we ensured every drachling was bound to a dragonstone as soon as they were able, but there are hardly any children being born at all. And even if there were enough new drachlings being hatched, there would be nowhere for them to settle once they leave the nest in the face of rapidly-reproducing humans. One of my own nephews has been unable to even leave his territory to journey the lands for a compatible coupling, he has been so consumed with losing and taking territory with one of the human towns that sprawled too close.

The next generation is not going to survive, whether at the hands of humans, or the degeneration, or faded to nothing as our people are reduced to complete sterility.

It is my hope that your talent with blood-magic can pull a solution from the mists, but regardless, something must be done. If not by you, then by me.

Your ally,

Tacitus the Immovable.

--

For every gate guard who waved through every suspicious foreigner and shifty-eyed traveler, there was one who took their job way, way too seriously.

“You can’t do that!”

The guard at the northern gate remained spear-straight, looking down their nose at Mu as she held on to Horf’s reins from the ground. “I assure you, I can.”

“But-” Mu floundered, before the guard cut her off.

“Look, it’s just a quick search. In and out.” The guard pinched the bridge of their nose, clearly exasperated. And then looked out over their fingers, eyes sharp. “Unless, of course, you have something to hide.”

“I do not!” Mu insisted, lying through her teeth. “I just don’t want some weird stranger digging through my stuff.”

“Nobody does,” the guard said wryly. “Now-”

A clearing throat, from a bit behind Mu. “Is there a problem, Sar Guard?”

Mu froze, wondering if her ears had conjured some kind of homesick deception. Something about that voice, the way the cadence of the words crackled…

“No, no problem, madame. Just some routine inspection,” the guard said, subtly taking a step back closer to their post.

“That’s an odd way to say ‘harassing my niece’, Sar,” the stranger said again, scolding the armed guard as if they were a child caught with their hand on a cooling pastry. “Not the kind of behavior I would expect out of a professional. Now, we’ll be on our way, or I’ll have to have a chat with the captain.”

“... Yes ma’am,” the guard said grudgingly.

With the guard’s attention off of her, Mu turned around to look at her rescuer.

Short, and stocky, dark eyes kind and warm as a lit hearth. Robes layered under a sand-pale sash, hair split into two braids and pinned back in the way that showed she was a married woman-

Another islander? Here?

A warm hand clamped on her shoulder, gently pulling her away toward the gate. “Come along, little lady, let’s get you back to the caravan.”

Mu followed mutely, Horf’s reins gripped tightly in sweaty hands, and mentally strained against the desire to brush her fingers across the book in her sash for reassurance. The moment they were out of the guard’s range, though…

“You’re Pelan!” Mu blurted out, pulling away from the woman’s guiding grip on her shoulder. Realizing she’d been rather rude, Mu faced the woman and nodded deeply in gratitude. “Uh, thanks for the help there. I didn’t have any trouble getting in, so it caught me by surprise.”

“Pssh, no worries, little lady. Chances are they were just picking on you because they were bored.” The woman gave her a knowing look askance. “Besides, you look fresh off the island. It wouldn’t do to leave one of my neighbors floundering in this snow drift of a city!” She gestured to a convoy of a dozen loaded wagons, lingering at the north gate like a flock of sea-vultures at the docks. “My name’s Catherina, head of the local merchant’s guild.” A wink. “You can call me Cookie, though. Most folks do.”

“Ooh, so that’s why the guard backed off…” And then a thought struck Mu, chill as day-old ashes, and she stuttered to a halt when they reached the convoy. “Have- do you know, what’s going on back home?”

Cookie froze as she approached the closest wagon. Slumped, resignation weighing heavily on her shoulders. “The Mafia? … Yes, I heard. I don’t get news from home often, but when the usual imports stopped arriving…” She shrugged helplessly even as her fingers flitted over the wagon’s tie-downs with practiced ease. “I tried, but… there’s not exactly much I can do- the Pelan Isle doesn’t have any alliances in Omnoc, and the Great Lords pretty much control all the military. I even contacted a frequent buyer in Cook lands before the blockade-” Cookie gave a canvas knot a particularly vicious yank, her anger evident through the cracks of her fair demeanor. “-And she said it wasn’t their problem, because the Mafia occupying the island are deserters, and not under their Boss’s authority anymore.”

The giddy flare of eagerness that burst out of Mu’s chest upon seeing and hearing familiarity and someone from home… faded somewhat.

And then she was gripping onto sun-hot temper with the same strength she gripped the horse’s reins, because she was reminded once again that she was the only one doing anything. The Mafia Boss refusing to leash his derelict-of-duty pirates. Other islanders running instead of fighting. And as much as she loved Luka, his passivity beyond verbal needling and hidden glares at the Mafia goons made Mu want to tear her hair out sometimes.

“-For what it’s worth, though,” Cookie continued, her somber voice breaking Mu out of the cascading sparks of her frustration. “I’m glad you could make it out. I’ve always got a seat open for another Pelan, if you need a place to stay. You wouldn’t be the first one who ran and needed a job.”

Despite wanting to lash a searing line of questions across Cookie, and wanting to bask in the soothing coolness of someone familiar, Mu sat on the impulse. “... I can’t. I have to go somewhere.”

“Oh? Where to?” Cookie asked, ambling down the flank of the wagon now that she was satisfied with the tie-downs.

“Just the Twilit Mountains,” Mu said, trying for casual, but the tightness in her voice probably gave it away. We might be so close…

Cookie paused her ascent up the ladder to the driver’s seat. “Huh, wonder what’s over there that’s so interesting.” At Mu’s obviously questioning look, she elaborated. “We’re going to be swinging past that direction anyway, and another young lady asked if she could hitch a ride.”

“That’s… nice,” Mu said in clear dismissal as she mounted Horf, because there was no way she was revealing to Cookie that there were rumors of distinctly draconic history surrounding the specific mountain she planned to investigate. “I’d actually like to stick around until we get near there, if that’s okay with you.”

Cookie’s curious squint didn’t go unnoticed, she discreetly declined to comment. “Of course. I was serious about the permanent offer- even on a temporary basis, it’d be a pleasure to have you!” Something of a cheeky grin replaced her scrutiny. “And if I were a betting woman, I’d say you missed having some real cooking.”

Mu tried not to drool at the offer, but if Cookie’s chuckle was anything to go by, her round eyes and eager expression at the prospect of real Pelan after so long didn’t go unnoticed.

--

Mu met the other ‘young lady’ a full day into the caravan’s journey. Specifically, because the other girl had popped her head out of the canvas curtains of the wagon Mu rode next to, scaring the life out of her (but not Horf, because Horf was either deaf or immune to all known fears on the earth).

“Hiya!” Blue eyes and sharp teeth grinned at Mu as she struggled to calm her racing heart.

Mu surreptitiously shook away the sparks that she’d already gathered to her hands in anticipation of a spell. “Didn’t your parents teach you not to sneak up on people?”

“Yes,” the strange girl said primly, and did not elaborate.

Mu scowled. “Well, did you need anything else besides scaring the wits out of me, or can I go? I have things to do.” She didn’t, but harmless frights aside, something was subtly off about this girl. Like the subtle rock as a deep-lurker brushed the bottom of a rowboat.

“Aw, I just wanted to talk.” The girl propped her chin on her hand as she settled further back into the wagon, the freckles on her face appearing even darker in the summer sun. “My name’s Hattie! Miss Catherina said there was another kid heading to the mountain range, so I wanted to say hi.”

Snitch, Mu thought, though her disparagement was aimed more at herself than at Cookie- it was her fault for assuming a Pelan trader wouldn’t spread benevolent gossip like the fire-cycle spreading across wetlands. “What’s got you heading up there?” Mu asked, curious despite her initial irritation.

Hattie’s easygoing expression faded, and she sat up straighter, her fidgeting fingers drawing Mu’s attention to the necklace she wore- a simple, woven thing, wrapped around a glassy marble the same purple color as the odd girl’s tunic. “I heard some… rumors, about something on the mountain that sounds like what I’m looking for.”

“Huh. The clawmarks? Guess that Restore quiver guy really got around the gossip docks,” Mu muttered. Made sense, though- anyone who was insane enough to waste that much gold on seeing a probably-cursed mountain wasn’t going to be, eh, discreet about their discoveries.

“Oh! Are you looking into dragons too?” Hattie pounced with frightening accuracy, prompting Mu to nudge Horf a bit further away from the wagon, because who in the Saints’ names even had hearing that keen? “Maybe we can search together!”

“Uh… no,” Mu said flatly, will and iron stubbornness channeled into deliberately not reacting, because if this strange teenager knew Mu was looking into dragons, she was only a few thought-skips away from learning about Snatcher if Mu wasn’t careful. “If I was looking for dragons, it’d be too dangerous for you, anyway.”

“Pssh, as if.” Hattie waved an imperious hand, a sly grin with a few too many teeth crawling across her face. Something about the uncanny way she carried herself, like a coiling banana-viper, even meant Mu almost believed the other girl’s confidence. “There’s not much that can threaten me out there. And it’ll be more fun with two people! Safer, too, if you’re so worried about it.”

Physical danger, Mu wasn’t worried about- Valflame sat heavy in her mind like the charge before lightning struck, and it wasn’t like there were going to be other people on the mountain anyways. The danger of knowledge, Snatcher’s existence floating loose on the Omnecian winds? That, she was concerned about. “Uh-huh, sure. And why, exactly, are you looking into dragons?”

“Yeah, well why are you looking for dragons?” Hattie shot back, just slow enough that she failed to hide her initial wide-eyed reaction.

Mu opened her mouth to deliver what was surely an impeccable excuse- and then stopped, because something about the way Hattie looked at her, as if she was being looked through instead of at, gave her pause. Suddenly far less confident in her ability to lie, Mu trailed off, fidgeting with the reins. “Uh…”

“That’s what I thought,” Hattie said levelly. Sighed, turning away from Mu to lean her back against the wagon’s sideboard. “I’m used to working alone, anyway.”

...Okay, Mu felt a little bit bad, looking at the dejected hunch of one of the few kids her age she’d met on this journey, but she had her priorities. With the blockade and tightened regulations, Omnoc was a dangerous place to be in, for them. And her and Snatcher’s lives came first.

Mu intentionally lagged behind the caravan, calling to the end-driver that she was still following them and for Madame Catherina not to worry. She was absolutely not avoiding the haze of prickling guilt that surrounded her after her conversation with Hattie. What was with that girl?

Purely on instinct, seeking his company, Mu pulled Snatcher from her sash and opened him, balanced across the horn of the saddle.

And then frantically pressed her hands onto his surface, flapping paper whipping dust and crinkling paper in a way that made her desperately grateful she’d decided to hang back out of earshot before taking him out. “Shhh! We’re around people, idiot!”

His frantic moth-flapping pages stilled for long enough that Mu could read the sloppy scrawls in blazing red. “I cannot believe you didn’t- she’s a dragon, kid!”

Mu nearly tilted Snatcher off the saddle in shock. “Wh- how can you tell?”

Snatcher fluttered his pages back into place, like a man smoothing out wrinkles in his tunic. “That weird rock she had? It’s a dragonstone.” Lines as long as centuries and dark as time looped around his edges, faded and wistful. “She can’t be more than eight hundred…”

“You’re sure?” Mu managed, disbelieving. Hattie had been a little bit… strange, sharp and spark-bright, but a human strange. “... Do you recognize her? Do you want to talk to her?” Seven hundred years to go without seeing one of your own...

“Of course not, she probably wasn’t even hatched by the time I died.” The sarcasm bled through his writing like acid. Mu looked away, stung, but still caught his words leaning toward her, bowed and apologetic. “... Sorry, kid. It’s- you couldn’t have known.” Heavy silence, before almost reluctantly the apology faded, replaced by new text. “We shouldn’t compromise ourselves by revealing anything. And we shouldn’t do anything to compromise her.”

Mu winced. Right, given the history between humans and dragons, and that odd ice-trickle of foreboding down her spine when she thought of why the Omnecian princess might be gathering dragon souls… The empire might be busy shielding themselves as the Metro raked its claws along their eastern flank, but Mu knew in her blood and in the impossible spell-angles seared into her mind that just one dragon-pact could reshape the war-currents like a stone dropped in a tide pool. What one could do with dozens of those…

Timmy said the crown princess was considered a little bit crazy. The Mafia of Cooks and Metropolitan Mercantile Republic had been fully split from the Omnecian Empire for at least two hundred years, and had near-constantly been cutting their teeth on each other for the past few decades of that split.

It wasn’t a secret that Omnecian Great Lords resented both the Metro and the Mafia for their successful secession and constant pirate-raids in response to Omnecian tariffs- even Mu knew about it, the rivalry old and bitter as aged wine. But to give both squabbling southern factions a common enemy…

Well. One would have to be a little bit crazy to do that.

Mu wasn’t stupid. Everyone knew about the part Tempus’s blood-pacts with the Crusaders played in war. Hell, it was basically what she was doing, using a blood-pact with a dragon for her own battle, even if he was an enemy to humanity’s war, rather than the ally that Tempus was.

Letting Omnoc get their hands on Snatcher was plainly not an option. He was a person, who talked and felt and cared (for his lost friends and family, for his scholarly pursuits, for her). He wasn’t a weapon, or a prisoner, and Hattie wouldn’t be either.

So Mu resolved to stay away from the dragon-girl. For Hattie’s secrecy, as well as her own.

(Also, privately, because she found Hattie somewhat unnerving and a little bit annoying. Her self-assurance and assumption that Mu was scared for their safety would have been even more irritating, except for the fact that she was a dragon, so Mu really couldn’t counter that.)

--

Mu resolutely avoided Hattie. With rather the same success as avoiding seagulls while carrying fried fish from a street-vendor.

That was to say, Hattie could not truly be resolutely avoided. Only resolutely ignored.

Unlike shooing away cackling seagulls, though, Mu felt like a bit of a jerk, getting up and switching campfires at night if Hattie approached, and reining Horf the opposite direction whenever the wagon Hattie hitched her rides on drifted too close.

Mu’s caution outweighed all of sour guilt, though. Privately, her nerves twitched with the thought that maybe there was some weird dragon blood stuff Snatcher forgot to tell her about, and that Hattie could sense him, somehow, and that was why she seemed to intent on talking to them.

Despite Mu’s anxiety, though, Hattie left them alone for the most part, after a few days of stringent avoidance.

She breathed a visible sigh of relief when she finally peeled off the caravan to climb the mountain they passed beneath- but not without a farewell from Cookie, and a few wraps of steamed buns, stuffed with spiced pork and vegetables (Which, naturally, were mostly devoured all at once on the way to the Twilight Mountain. It tasted like home).

Brushing the crumbs from her hands and off her tunic, Mu pulled Snatcher from her sash once more, opening him so he could get a page-full of the world as he so enjoyed. “So, anything about this rock look familiar to you?”

Though it was little more than an oddly domed outline standing stark before the fading stars of dawn, there was enough definition from the rising sun to pick out swathes of pine trees and jagged furrows in the stone, like chips out of a great bell.

A page-corner flicked at her thumb, and Mu turned Snatcher back around to face her. “... No, it doesn’t. But it’s the best lead we have.” The text sharpened, as in in sudden realization. “Wait a moment, didn’t everyone who went up there get turned around? How do you plan to deal with that?”

Mu held back a sigh. “Well, that figures. As for getting up there…” She’d thought about it, a little, during her travels with Cookie’s caravan. If Restore staves lifted the disorienting effect the mountain had on people, no matter how temporarily, it meant it was a physical cause, resulting in a physical ailment. “Honestly, I think so long as you navigate, we’ll be fine. You, er, don’t exactly have a brain to get messed with by whatever is going on up there.”

“... Hm,” Snatcher finally said. Or at least it’s what Mu thought he said- not all of it was words, but he had a particular way of fading in red blood-splotches under her fingertips as he pondered. “Yes, I suppose that could work. Let’s just get up there as fast as we can. Something about that mountain…” He trailed off, words fading like morning mist, and then was silent.

Ominous, Mu couldn't help but think, shivering in a way that had nothing to do with the cool Omnecian summer sunrise.

She pulled her cloak tighter around herself, and continued resolutely toward the mountain, its peak fire-stained by the light of the sun.

--

Even as Horf ambled up the low, rocky slope at a casual walk, something felt almost off to Mu. Like the scent of a storm during a clear day.

Then, daydreaming with a full belly from the midday meal and trusting her mount to stay on the path, Mu swore profusely as Horf veered off to the side as if avoiding a ravine only he could see, skirting the mountain sideways instead of continuing to climb the path.

Mu pulled the reins back to the side, forcing him to face the mountain peak, but Horf simply rubbernecked away from the path, and Mu had to yank him to a halt before he side-skittered off a cliff.

After catching her breath in the mountain-chill and already thinning air, Mu dismounted. “I don’t think we’ll be getting very far with him,” she said aloud for Snatcher’s benefit. “Kinda weird that I’m not feeling anything yet though…”

Nothing more than the slight daze like being under the sun too long in summer back home, and whispers on the wind that tugged at her like a loadstone did to iron.

Shaking the feeling off like water, Mu tied Horf to a tree, pointed an imperious finger at him and commanded “You, stay,” and continued up the slope on foot.

Idly, as stone and scrubby pine passed her by, Mu noted how the comparatively smooth mountainside looked so different from the caldera at home- Falamand’s jagged peaks surrounding the volcanic center rose sheer and tall, granite shunted up to scrape the sky. The Twilight Mountain was a far kinder climb, in comparison.

And yet still, she felt unnerved. Watched. Hairs rose on the back of her neck, like scaly spines that were not there-

Rustle.

Whirling, Mu leapt in fright, landing heavily enough to kick the gravel out from beneath her boots.

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you!”

Mu whipped her head to the summer-dried bushes as they rattled, taking in the purple tunic and half-cloak, almost dull in comparison to lightning-blue eyes. “Ugh, you again?” Mu scowled as Hattie stepped out of her obscuring bush, brushing dry needles and twigs off her shoulders. “If you didn’t mean to scare me, don’t go sneaking up behind me!”

“I didn’t!” Hattie protested. “I was just going the same direction you were. You knew that already.”

Mu had, admittedly, forgotten. “Yeah, so? Stop following me, then.”

“I’m not following you!” Hattie huffed, arms crossed. “You made it very clear you wanted nothing to do with me! It’s not my fault there’s only one path up to the peak.”

Guh. That meant Hattie had been so close to Mu the entire time, and she hadn’t even noticed. Freaky. “... Just don’t get in my way.”

Resolutely, Mu turned away from the dragon-girl, grabbing Snatcher from her sash and holding him. Just in case- in case of something. Even if she wasn’t acting like a sea-lost madman, something on the Twilight Mountain lit her nerves like sparks. And it wasn’t Hattie who was doing it.

It felt like something far, far larger.

Chapter Text

Blood is what our souls are bound to, and as such is a far less exact science than human magic. It is intent, and knowledge, and a practice that can only be learned from one living teacher, who has felt the magic pass through their claws and manifest into the world, onto a living student. The pillars of draconic blood magic are as such:

Transference. Dragonstones are a vessel for our power and our mass, allowing us to walk the world on human limbs and bar the degeneration entry to our minds. The blood is the binding of the soul, thus the binding of blood to stone and spell creates the dragonstones.

Death. To kill another of your own kind… only lawkeepers may render this spell upon another. Execution is a most dire punishment for most dire crimes- kinslaying, high treason, the murder of a drachling. The knowledge of how to render permanent death on another dragon with something so simple as a spell and blood is why lawkeepers are held to such stringent standards of impartiality, at least in matters of the court and council of judgement. It is also knowledge strictly kept within that group- even the highest rulers are not privy to it.

The pact. Humans are not dragons, but they are intelligent enough to deal with us, and sturdy enough to withstand our lifeblood. I know not who discovered this phenomenon, for there is no spell or words or knowledge, only intent, and a human drinking our blood. And humans can draw on that power to cast human magic, lines and formulae and wordless circles that are devastating in their power and magnificent in their destruction. But the cost of such a pact… Well, there is a reason it is very strictly discouraged. Nobody wishes to give humans such power that exceeds even the dragon they dealt with, or see the second coming of The Vehement walk the earth.

Binding. Not a spell. A curse, new and untested, and I shudder to think of how The Incandescent managed to create an entirely new blood-tale to pass knowledge through, including to humans. Magic to bind the entirety of the soul to a small portion of the blood, and binding that to an object- neither death nor resurrection, the truest severance of the mind from the body. Including such magic among the other pillars makes my scales crawl, yet it is already created, and disseminated, and has even been used. It is not vanishing any time soon, and so I present this as a warning.

I write this so that even the knowledge that is considered so ingrained, so basic, will not truly be lost. For Tempus the Incandescent was correct- our people are dying, and will continue to do so. And she is helping us along that path- she looked upon who should claim stewardship over the continent, and found dragons more wanting than humans.

I have seen enough of both. Tempus was wrong- humans and dragons are equally vile creatures. To my dear Brigid’s children and grandchildren, to whomst all these past writings are addressed to- I hope they were illuminating, and educational.

Do not look for me. I will not be returning to this continent while I still draw breath.

-Ilah the Judge.

--

Patience was a fleeting virtue for Mu. Her success with it tended to match up with how badly she wanted something- stubborn enough to wait in the eaves of the convent and shadowed alleys, to span the entire southern continent one step at a time.

Stubborn enough to ignore her unwanted hanger-on in mulish silence, slowly picking her way across the crumbling mountain paths.

“The least you can do,” Mu ground out, frustrated that she couldn’t even take out Snatcher and show him around the mountain without raising the other girl’s suspicion. “Is not follow so closely behind.”

The mere six feet of distance between them was not enough to keep Hattie’s scoff from reaching Mu’s ears. “Uh-huh, yeah, sure. We’re both looking for the same thing, but I’m just sightseeing. I have no idea what you’re after.” The implication of ‘because you are human’ only remained implied because Mu knew for certain this girl was not.

Sightseeing, my ass. Still, the implied accusation stung. “And that’s none of your business, so keep your nose out of it.”

“Sheesh, it’s not like we’re almost at the top or anything,” Hattie retorted as she drifted off to investigate a particularly dark shadow beneath one of the long cliffs rimming the mountain path.

And vanished.

Stunned, Mu ran to where the other girl had been.

Backpedalled, gravelly stone ground rolling beneath her boots as she very nearly followed Hattie over the edge into a sloping cave, wider than a whale’s mouth.

It wasn’t too steep, but it was pretty far down, so… “Hey! You still alive down there?”

“Yes- you’ve got to come down here!” drifted up from the shadows, airy and joyed. “It’s incredible!”

Hesitantly, Mu picked and slid her way down the yawning pit, shivering as the sun vanished behind the stone roof, revealing Hattie, staring mesmerized at-

Whoah.

Not the winter-dark blackness Mu had been expecting. Like the sphere of the heavens brought low, star-bright crystals hung from the cavern ceiling, spiraling into constellations that did not exist.

Unable to take her eyes off the sight above her, Mu took out Snatcher and wordlessly opened him so his pages faced the false sky. He had to see this.

“Look,” Hattie murmured, nudging Mu with her elbow and pointing. Like the milky band of stardust that could be seen on clear Pelan nights, the glow-crystals flowed across the cave-roof and into the deeper cavern tunnels.

If anywhere is going to be a dragon’s den, Mu surmised. It would be here.

Holding Snatcher facing outward like a scout’s spyglass, or perhaps a shield, Mu didn’t wait to ask if they should venture further.

“What’s with the book?” Hattie whispered beside her, craning her head to look at Snatcher’s paper despite the lack of light to read by.

Mu snatched him away from her gaze, holding him close to her chest like a poker player guarded their cards. “It’s a journal. Guide. Thing. It’s none of your business is what it is, actually.”

The dragon-girl simply huffed and rolled her eyes. “Fine, be that way. Not like it matters.”

Hattie was frustratingly surefooted as the stalked down the slope of the cavern, whereas Mu was left to squint in the low light that illuminated the ground about as well as moonlight through black glass. As the star-stippled ceiling splayed outward into a larger cavern, Mu swore as she nearly tripped over a rocky divot in the ground.

The world around them rumbled as her voice echoed in the cave, and both dragon and human froze. Like an impossibly huge monster rousing itself from the black ocean depths, jagged shadows shifted before them and the rocky walls beside them drew back into the cavern that they faced.

Those aren’t the cave walls, Mu realized numbly, clinging Snatcher’s open pages close to her and not protesting as Hattie grabbed onto her arm with bruising strength. Those are its forelegs.

The thunderous cacophony of a rockslide faded, and pale blue eyes opened, hanging above them like twin moons in the false diamond-star sky. “Ahh, it has been quite a long time since I’ve entertained guests.” Baritone and thrumming through Mu’s bones like struck crystal, the creature- no, the dragon- spoke the words of men like someone who was long, long out of practice. “For you must surely be guests, if your steps guided you here. Allow me to illuminate us.”

Like the moon rising, the glowing crystals intensified to bathe the vast cavern in soft light, bright enough for Mu to read by without straining her eyes.

Eyes which she really wished weren’t working quite so well, because as she craned her head up and up and up, any thoughts Mu had along the lines of ‘I could beat him if I needed’ dissipated like steam.

Jaws large enough to swallow a skiff whole opened, revealing an endlessly dark ravine with gleaming white teeth hanging over the edges. “... Very strange guests.” The enormous head lowered achingly slow, the beard of glow-lichen brushing the ground as the dragon peered at the awe-frozen girls. “How very strange indeed, for a human to make their way into my mountain, past the magnetic fields meant to lead your kind astray. And two Fire Dragons! How long it has been since I have seen another of my kind.”

Hattie’s reverie visibly shattered, her frantic shushing motions doing nothing to hide her low hiss of “Shhh, Mister Dragon, be quiet about that, she doesn’t know-”

“Actually, I already figured it out,” Mu interrupted. At Hattie’s dumbfounded look, she shrugged and shifted her feet. “I just thought that if you were hiding it, it would be awkward to bring up.”

“I- you-” Hattie’s gaze whipped from Mu to the Earth Dragon, one hand clutching her dragonstone nervously, before confusion stuttered her questions to a halt. “... Wait. Who’s the other Fire Dragon?”

Hattie startled as Snatcher’s pages fluttered softly in a sigh. “Yeah, that wasn’t going to last.”

“Because you’re literally incapable of shutting up despite not having a mouth,” Mu grumbled in retaliation before she caught herself, glancing at the Earth Dragon out of the corner of her eye in worry- but, he did say they were guests. Dragons were civilized, and civilized people didn’t kill their explicitly-deemed guests under their own roof.

She hoped.

“But- a book?” Hattie questioned, shuffling closer to prod at the blood-dark ink. Snatcher allowed it, red flaring out from where Hattie gently poked his paper and then yanked back her hand as if it was stung.

“I had heard of the curse of binding Tempus and her human pact-holders created to alter the balance of the war…” The dragon chuffed, almost blasting Hattie and Mu off their feet with his soil-scented breath. “Oh, how foolish of me, I’d forgotten my manners over the centuries! You may call me Twilight.”

Recognizing the invitation for what it was, Hattie bobbed in a short and informal bow. “Just Hattie. No- no title,” she mumbled the last admittance with a small amount of shame.

“Uh, Muriel, also no title. And this is the Soul-Snatcher,” Mu said, holding Snatcher in front of her awkwardly.

“Hmm. How fascinating.” Mu tried not to cringe back as Twilight’s nostrils constricted, nearly sucking Snatcher out of her grip with his scenting. “Not a title I recognize. How did you manage to escape the confines of the human fortresses? I cannot imagine they left such dangerous enemies out of their claws so easily.” A tilt of his massive head. “Although, they simply could have forgotten. I’ve found humans hold onto their memories in quite the same way fish do.”

Swallowing down her retort at what was probably an unintentional insult, Mu splayed Snatcher wider for him to answer, his text large and blocky enough for everyone to see. Best to let him answer this, she’d never talked to another dragon besides him and Hattie and really, really didn’t want to mess up with this one. Genial as he may have seemed, Twilight’s teeth were huge. “I made a deal with the human child, Elder. Power, and the spell, in exchange for my soul returned to my body.”

Moon-eyes glanced at Mu before returning to the words on Snatcher’s page, slow as waking stone, as Mu awkwardly readjusted so she was holding Snatcher in such a way that they could both read him. “Ah, one of those deals, I see. Desperate times call for desperate measures to escape such a complete form of imprisonment. And making a blood-pact with a child is quite desperate.”

Mu shuffled awkwardly at that. She hadn’t quite understood just how desperate, at first. Hers was evident, given they met in a jail cell- but in the black of night, eyes closed and body still in the moments before sleep, Mu wondered at what it would be like, to be trapped like that for years upon years.

It was not a pleasant desperation to ponder.

(Snatcher said that now he would oust the Mafia for her even without their deal. And even without their informal deal, Mu figured she would return Snatcher to his body in turn.)

“Though not desperate enough to simply take yourself to your body on human legs,” Twilight continued, musing as if it was only the echoing cave walls that would respond to him. “Tempus never did possess her Crusaders either, though. She was in her own body, of course-”

What?

“Wait- hold on- possession? What?” Hattie waved her hands frantically in an attempt to catch the old dragon’s attention. “I never heard anything about that in any history books!”

“Ah, the human smell, and you are so young- of course you would not know,” Twilight said to Hattie pityingly, as if Mu’s guts weren’t slowly knotting on themselves as the net of realization wove around her with each word.

“A dragon’s soul is bound to their blood- why do you think we can return to our slain bodies and revive them, or be imprisoned such as the Soul-Snatcher was?” Snatcher’s pages stiffened like sheets of iron, rigid with dread.

“A dragon’s pact with humans is always sealed in blood- you are a halfling, but I would still advise against making any ill-thought blood-deals with humans. The avenue for taking a pacted human’s body exists naturally for any dragon who makes such bonds with them, but, well, better to be safe than sorry, for one who is half-human herself.” Twilight’s ponderous, rambling advice faded beneath the buzzing in Mu’s ears, like the roar of the ocean.

“Though blood-pacts are not to be encouraged, regardless,” Twilight said wryly, as if to reassure Hattie as her eyes widened at the knowledge he professed. “You were not raised on tales of Mila and Duma’s folly, nor of the century of bloodshed wrought by Loptyr’s rule through human hosts. You would not know the weight of such deals.”

“You would not know the weight of such deals.”

Like Mu didn’t. Like Snatcher-

Mu looked down to the book in her hands, which had steadily been slipping from slack fingers before she brought it up to face her once more. “Kid- no, listen, you don’t want to know- shut up you old lizard, it’s not something I like but it’s literally encoded into our blood-”

Breathing strangled as if caught in volcanic ashfall, old terror of what-could-have-been burning in her heart like lava, Mu slung Snatcher away, ignoring Hattie’s yelp of surprise as she barely caught him. “You! Is this true?!”

Hattie fumbled open the book, and bit her lip at something she saw written there, turning Snatcher around to face Mu. “Look, I- yes, dragons can possess pacted humans, but I never, ever planned to use it, it’s forbidden by the law these days for a reason, and y’know, human bodies are kinda gross anyway-”

I’m done with this. Mu looked away from his huge, stricken words, fingernails digging painful crescents into her clenched hands. “That’s not the point! You should have told me! I thought I was just going to take you to your body!” Vision blurred, Mu couldn’t stop herself from looking back at a stunned Hattie and a Snatcher whose frantic red scribbling she could not read. “I thought I could trust you!”

Every trace of red vanished from Snatcher’s paper, save for the dotted splatters of her own blood from when she stitched her arm closed by his guidance. The book stiffened and shuddered in Hattie’s hands, and she yelped, dropping him as he snapped his covers closed like a steel trap and landed in the hard dirt of Twilight’s cave.

Panic and dread and lies, lies, lies, signing away her soul without even knowing-

Blindly, Mu ran from the cave, away from the dragons.

She should have known. Dragon, teacher, guardian, enemy of mankind. Stupid.

The setting sun greeted her as she scrambled up the cave mouth, red like lava. Like blood staining her teeth as she unknowingly opened the way for a dragon to possess her body should he choose.

It ached, like being trapped in a sea-cave without air, stronger than the roll of gravel beneath her boots and the bone-aching impact of her feet on stone as she pelted down the mountain. Thoughts scattered like leaves in the wind, because she didn’t know what to do, because she had cared and so did Snatcher, and it wasn’t fair-

Horf looked up from the patch of tough rock-grass he was grazing on, huge eyes giving away nothing as Mu swiped her arm across her eyes, leaving a damp patch on her sleeve.

After she mounted her horse, shaking fingers instinctually drifted to where Snatcher was usually tucked into her sash before she yanked her hand away. Despite everything, his absence suddenly hurt just as much as his presence had, once the hidden strings of their deal down in a Pelan gaol were revealed.

It hurt because she trusted him.

It hurt more because it was real.

Mu turned Horf away from the mountain peak, and forced herself not to look back.

Chapter Text

To Snatcher, it felt almost as bad as dying again. Failure was always its own kind of death, as was guilt.

Perhaps it was cowardly, to simply lay in the dirt like a common tome and keep his covers snapped tighter than a bear’s jaws, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood to bare his shame to a pair of strange dragons.

Ideally Muriel never would have known it was part of a draconic blood-pact, and lived a pleasant life on her Mafia-free island while Snatcher looked for Halcyone.

That’s not really trust though, is it? And he’d wanted to be someone she could trust. Who was worth trusting.

Spirits above, he was a terrible father.

But perhaps he didn’t have to be. Like sparks amid smoke, the thought glinted at him. He couldn’t change it, wasn’t even sure he could fix it, but Snatcher could do better. He already lost one child, left them alone in the world, and the thought of allowing it to happen again turned the glue of his spine to ice.

Gentle hands plucked him up from the dirt, tentatively cracking him open. “Um… Mister Snatcher? Is it true, that- that dragons can do that?” Hattie asked, voice trembling.

“... Yeah, kid. It is. That kind of power ties humans to us, and us to them. There’s a cost to everything.” The cost of governance over one’s own body, should the dragon die or be detached from their own vessel. The words felt like fire as he inked his blood across the surface of the paper, because he knew what it was like to be powerless, to have no control. Both as a dragon and as a book.

“Do you want me to take you to her?” Hattie asked, uncertain and shifting her attention from him to Twilight, who still loomed above them both, stone-silent and ponderous.

Snatcher almost said yes, because she was a kid he was responsible for, but… “No, it’s best not to. I don’t think she’d want that.”

“Oh…” Questing fingers curiously flipped his pages and poked at the red that welled up on the paper but didn’t stain her skin like ink would. “I can take you with me, I guess? I’ve never met another dragon before, so…”

Never. Snatcher knew how long it had been since he’d seen the world, but that still wasn’t exactly promising. To be alone even when surrounded by others was a terrible thing- a thing he had been forcibly acquainted with over his imprisonment, surrounded by other bound souls with no way to speak to them in the black silence.

“Of course. Certainly better than staying here. It’s far too dark.”

Twilight snorted, a small dust storm rising around the drachling and the book she held. “Coming from the clan that thinks active lava lakes are a pleasant place to nap, it could be midday on the surface and too dark for you.” That stony face softened. “But, little spark, I do wish you well, wherever the earth may take you. You are always welcome to return- I have missed speaking to my own kind more than I thought I would, after all.”

“Thank you, Sir Twilight,” Hattie murmured, bowing lightly in the distinctly Omnecian way- the human way, reminding Snatcher all too uncomfortably that there likely were no more truly living dragons on the continent besides an ancient Earth Dragon too age-weary to touch the world and a gawky drachling who never saw another of her own kind before now.

(By all the spirits above and below he clung to the hope that there were more. One more, because he failed his wards- both of them- and while the bitter sting of his failure to be the person Muriel needed and deserved clung to him like ash, he at least knew she was alive.)

(He didn’t even remember what Halcyone looked like. Of all the memories that faded into the dark silence of the vault, that one ached the most, like an unstitched tear in his wings.)

Hattie climbed out of the cave swiftly, Snatcher tucked under her arm and steel-strong fingernails clinging into the rock face like claws as she scaled her way back to the surface. Though it was hard to tell from his angle, Snatcher caught her frown as she gazed at the sun; it was perhaps an hour or two from setting properly, and while the warmth of a campfire had never been a concern for Muriel…

Snatcher rumbled like an earthquake’s warning, and Hattie dropped him with a yelp.

“Sorry, sorry! I didn’t know you could do, uh, that.” Hattie fluttered her hands in a vague gesture as she bent to scoop him up from the granite ground and open him to face her. “Y’know, move.”

“Oh, please, I’m not completely inanimate. Just don’t drop me again- I’d rather not get chucked down the mountain because someone has a case of soap-fingers.”

Scowling, Hattie jabbed at his letters like they were particularly annoying bugs she could squish. “Wow, rude! And I was about to offer to carry you to your body!”

“... What?”

“I don’t exactly have any better leads, and there’s some stuff I want to learn for real instead of teaching myself.” Demonstratively, she exhaled a tiny puff of fire that bloomed and dissipated like morning glories. “I heard a lot of the Crusaders’ War growing up, and I know there’s more we can do than just breathe fire in a straight line.”

Another reminder of how much had been lost in the centuries since his imprisonment. But first… “I can teach you some things- frankly, your lack of education is poor enough that I would anyway- but returning me to my body… wouldn’t work.” Like squeezing the blood from an open wound, he forced the words to continue across his page. “I- the blood-pact. It’s what I needed to act as a conduit to take my original vessel back.”

“...Oh.” Hattie cringed noticeably at the reminder of the whirlwind in Twilight’s cavern, and noticeably held Snatcher at more of a distance. “The- yeah.”

Silence, save for the soft scuff of boots on the mountain-path. “So… why are you searching for dragons? It seems like everyone is, these days.” Little half-dragons, Omnecian princesses, a bright spark of a human child-

“I’m looking for my dad,” Hattie admitted, voice low. “He left when I was really young, but all of Mom’s journals were really insistent he has to be alive.”

“Well, it’s not like there are many options for your father out there, given the war killed most of us.”

She frowned at the deceptively light script. “That’s not a very funny joke, Snatcher.”

More scrubby trees and jagged outcroppings passed them by; Hattie was moving much faster than Muriel could, taking shortcuts by leaping from punishing heights that would have broken a full human’s bones, skidding down gravel paths without losing her balance.

As the path leveled out, no longer steep enough to make an average hiker think twice, Snatcher felt his pages being fiddled with. “You want something, or?”

Startled, Hattie yanked back her fingers as if they’d been ice-burnt. “Um… just thinking. Maybe you knew my dad? Or knew of him. Dragons of the same clan tended to stick together, right?”

“You’re not wrong.” Snatcher just happened to be an exception, given Venka’s close connections to the ruling Ice council. But it was worth a try- at the very least, if her father was dead, he would break the news to her as gently as he could. Which was admittedly about as gentle as fanged basalt, but he considered it a better option than ignorance. “Tell me his name. Or his title, either works.”

“I, uh, don’t know his title, but I know his name was Lukianos.”

Every inch of Snatcher’s pages flashed bright red in blood-stained shock.

Like sky-fire in the wake of a comet’s tail, scarlet flared across soul-bound paper. “Halcyone?”

--

Mu set up camp hours before the sun set. She most certainly could have safely traveled more, but…

I don’t like traveling in the dark alone.

Which was utterly pathetic, missing Snatcher even as she was angry enough at him to shatter trees in a whirl of rabid fire-magic, emotion expelled as careless spell-slugging.

It hadn’t made her feel any better, though. Just sad. Because everything in the interim between their flight from the island to their trek up the mountain had been far, far too real. As was the knowledge creeping like cinder-vines through her skin that at any moment, past or future, her friend and maybe-guardian could have reached through her blood and seized control.

But despite the hidden clause of their blood-pact being exposed like an open wound, all pretense brushed away, it never happened.

As the night wore on, and sleep tugged at her eyelids, the fear of waking up not as herself faded.

(Conniving bastard that he was, the Soul-Snatcher always, apparently, kept his promises.)

--

Stunned as a sun-dazzled snow-owl, Hattie nearly dropped the book- Snatcher- Lukianos- Dad- before fumbling for it again and sitting heavily on the rocks, right there in the center of the path at the mountain’s foot.

It felt like sun-bright eyes boring a heated gaze between her ribs and into her heart- she hadn’t heard that name in a long, long time, but had read it quite recently. Her human mother’s remaining letters to her always took care to spell out the name her baby cousins throughout the centuries could never seem to pronounce.

But the world had not taught her to trust easily. “What- tell me my mother’s name. If you actually are-” Actually my dad, actually dead-

“Camellia. Of Nikolaos.” Soft as a breath, red wrote itself into the paper with what ink was not surrounding where her fingers touched the pages like it was trying to grasp for her hands. “My best friend.”

Hattie’s fearful doubt that this was too good to be true burned away like dawn mist, and she buried her tears in old leather- a book cover, where there should be night-solid armored scales. “I- my family all thought you were dead.” I almost did, too.

“I am dead though. Because I promise you, there is nothing else on this earth that would have kept me from coming back for you.” And nothing that would make him abandon her again.

The clear conviction of his words, intense as high noon sun, nearly sucked the breath from Hattie. “I-” she started, words feeling like smoothed stones in her gut. I don’t even know you, not really, but… “I missed you,” she said simply instead.

Wind whistling across the rock, and the faint crunch-crackle of brittle mountain-shrubs waving.

Snatcher’s blood spun and curled thicker around where she touched his paper, but before he could write anything more, Hattie gripped him tighter, determined. “We’ll find another way to get your body back, and- and then you can come back to Nikolaos with me- it’s been a few decades, but I’m sure some of my family will still remember me, and Nikolaos is pretty far away from the big Omnecian cities-”

“Kid, wait, slow down-”

“And there’s plenty of space in the farmhouse for another person, especially if you hunt with me during winter for extra meat and-” Hattie rushed on, words spilling out of her like water.

“No, listen, there’s something-”

The wind had died, the air silent and still.

The sound of rustling bushes did not die with the wind.

Hattie whirled around, one hand gripping Snatcher close, the other flying up to grab at her dragonstone.

Something cracked across the back of her head, and the world went out.

--

“Hi, Halcyone, it's your- well, think of me as your guardian. Or your other mom. Whatever word you feel fits.

Dragons live a long time, and age slow; I know you will outlive my descendants, and their children, and their children, and theirs, and so on. So this is something to set the record straight, even if my nieces and nephews think it's a waste of good ink and paper.

You may not remember most of it- you were smaller than me at the time, even!- but Lukianos often brought you to stay with me and my family when he and his heart's lady were called by the councils of their clans- unrest is brewing among the dragons, after all. But you were too young to leave alone in the nest, and half-human besides, so it was my pleasure to babysit you. You certainly inherited enough of my good looks to fit in among your cousins in human form!

However, not long ago, he came to me and passed you into my arms, closed my fingers around your dragonstone, and told me that he would be back soon. That the dragon chiefs were courting war with humans, and the stress of it was getting to Venka, as the Ice Clan’s heir.

And, if all goes well, you can continue to live with our family as the centuries go by, even after I'm gone. But I am going to be gone someday, and I think you should know this, if nothing else:

Lukianos loved you, deeply. He didn't abandon you. He had every intention of returning for you as he always had- I'd known him long enough to see the honesty writ on his face, even when it was long and scaly. Don't let anyone or anything convince you otherwise. Keep this with you to remind yourself, because not even death would keep him from loving you.

I hope you at least will have more to remember us by besides this old letter.

Your third parent,

Camellia"

Chapter Text

Horf a steady rocking gait beneath her, Mu considered her options- and just as they were from morning to midday to the moon chasing the sun out of the sky, she was coming up with… very limited ones.

She couldn’t exactly fly in with a dragon anymore- her breath stuttered at that repetitive realization of that- and from all her past fireside tales heard from Snatcher, she knew exactly how important the aerial advantage would be. Valflame… she never tested it out, but she knew it was big, the same way she now knew, burning in her blood, how the sparking blowback of Bolganone could topple loaded wagons, and how far Meteor could arc across from her to strike at her target.

Valflame was a siege-breaker. Dragonbane. Pact-spells broke the backs of armies, and now that Mu could grasp the scope of that power, both from the eyewitness of the Crusaders’ War she had carried in her sash and from the odd trigonometry of the spell that blazed in the back of her skull…

(Not long ago, Snatcher had written that he would help her drive off the Mafia from her territory for no other reason than that the island was hers. She wasn’t sure if she didn’t believe him, still.)

Using Valflame in a heavily populated location was a bad, bad idea. Not if she wanted to avoid any deaths among the citizens that still stubbornly clung to the island.

So she would have to figure out a way to get rid of the Mafia without letting anyone who actually belonged in the town get caught in the blast. It was… doable. Probably. She just had to think about it, and get as much mileage as she could out of the pact-spell in open spaces.

The weight of it was almost too much, the steam-rise of anxiety as if she’d leapt off a cliff too far from the water, and was just now seeing the waves reach curling foam-fingers for her. The Mafia had taken over the town so thoroughly, displaced and yet living too close to so many of the Pelan people…

She couldn’t do this alone. She had to.

Stuffing the cloying feeling back into its box, Mu acknowledged that first, she’d need to get back there. Flying… clearly wasn’t an option. The blockade was focused on keeping people out of Omnoc, so perhaps if she paid a ship captain enough she could slink between the blockade on their vessel…

Something smudged the distant, smoke-hazed and nearly transparent in the glare of the setting sun. Like a bonfire. Or a campfire- a big one.

Mu angled Horf away, so that they would skirt the range of the doubtlessly-large encampment. Best not to court trouble. And yet…

Something tugged at her, like the moon did the tides.

Mu pulled her horse to a stop, and thought very, very hard about what she might do. Closed her eyes, and remembered the last time she felt this way, the searing rake of smoke through her instincts that made her yank her arm up and in the way of a blade, preventing it from piercing her side.

This is so, so fucking stupid.

She nudged Horf around, and urged him into a quiet trot.

--

A mile out from where she estimated the campsite to be, Mu dismounted and pulled Horf into the particularly thick copse of pines, tying him down loosely.

She had considered ambling in on horseback, playing the passing traveler in a bid for information as she scouted, but such a large encampment, without evidence of broken brush from wagons, or the very presence of so many people this far off the road…

A smart thief knew when to be an innocent traveler, and when to be a ghost.

And Mu was a very smart thief- she’d learned quickly, as the seasons wore on under the Mafia’s takeover.

So she ghosted behind the shadows of trees and swept closer to the now-visible campsite as the breeze rattled the pine-boughs and overtook the near-inaudible sounds of her footsteps on soft pine needles- better to be safe than sorry.

Mu gulped as the bright firelight of a celebratory bonfire darkened the edges of her vision and burned her eyes in the night-dark, taking in the illuminated forms of a lot of people. Milling around the tents near the back, one loitering near the dozen-odd horses tied to a ground-pole, at least ten people gathered around the fire with tin mugs and boisterous gestures, and-

Hattie. Hands tied behind her back and sat on a log, glaring stubbornly at a bored-looking woman in Sniper attire who was stationed close enough that she had to be a guard.

Mu’s breath stopped as the half-dragon’s eyes met hers. Hattie blinked slowly, like a hunting cliff-lizard, and pointedly shifted her gaze to one of the felled logs ringing the campfire- further from the fire than the occupied ones, draped in drying clothes, stacked with used cups and plates, and-

Glinting with the faint sparks of reflected firelight, a tiny, smooth stone on an untied necklace. Resting next to it, a knife and a very familiar book.

Snatcher. And Hattie’s dragonstone.

Mu looked back at Hattie. Scanned the periphery of the campsite- weapons propped on the seats next to the relaxing campers, boiled leather armor worn in pieces by some of them still- the comfort of a group of people who knew they were more than a match for anything that came through their campsite.

Well. Almost anything; Mu ran the numbers and arcs and elegant curves of Fire magic through her mind like a thief polished their sharpest blades. These guys wouldn’t be prepared for her.

She didn’t even entertain the thought of leaving them behind. She’d come all this way already, and- and for all that Snatcher was a knife dangling above her neck and that Hattie was basically a stranger, it wouldn’t be right to leave them to whatever a bunch of mercenaries had them for. It wouldn’t be justice.

Chatter washed softly over Mu as she approached closer, the campfire’s light nearly touching her.

“Can’t believe that tip was legit, man- I swear that student was lying.” Calm, the relaxed tone of a laborer after a long day.

“Eh, maybe not lying- you see that look in his eye? I could believe he’d seen something on the mountain and got spooked enough to tell tall tales,” snorted back from across the mercenaries’ log. “Besides, you see the amount of gold the princess put up for dragon stuff? Even if it turned out to be a load of nothing, it was worth checking out even for just a chance at that kind of haul.”

Mu froze. Princess Vanessa’s bounty on dragons. Shit.

“Never thought we’d find a live one though. Think she’ll pay us extra for her?” the first mercenary mused, fingers drumming along their greaves as if already thinking of the gold pieces that would spill between them.

Oh, hell. She really had to get Hattie out of here.

The wavering shadows of the mercenaries against the firelight offered Mu a few flickering layers of movement to hide herself against, and she took every advantage of it as she moved between the gaps of their attention. Silence, speed, silence again, steps light as the brush of smoke into the wind-

Nearly laying flat behind the log, Mu listened for any movement. Slowly, she wrapped the dragonstone-tie around her hand. The knife was next, sliding into her boot.

Her hand hovered over the book. Before she could touch it, Mu froze, fingers trembling.

Even in her hesitation, the book didn’t move- and she knew he could, leather rumbling like a cat’s purr and pages snapping like butterfly wings and the creak of straining spine-glue as paper stained with her own blood reached for her fingertips as she slept-

He still didn’t move. Did nothing to draw her attention, or prod her into a decision. Her hand drifted closer to rest against the cover.

(Maybe the terms concealed a lie. Maybe he had deliberately kept the full weight of it from her. But her feelings were real. But everything that happened in the interim was real- the tutoring and the campfire stories of a people seven hundred years past and the careful instructions in lieu of stitching her injuries himself and the warmth of a dragonsoul at night and the promise to protect her and her home even without the incentive of a blood-pact and love is about giving people what they need, like teachers did to students and parents did to children-

Mu had needed Snatcher.)

She was still angry with him. The feeling of being betrayed burned like love at the edges. But she could yell at him later, when he wasn’t going to be hauled off as some puffed-up Omnecian noblewoman’s weapon.

Mu’s hand closed around the book.

And she almost dropped him again at the call of “Hey! You!”

Mu froze, arm full of book and dragonstone, as nearly a dozen pairs of eyes jumped to attention and locked onto her like hunting sea-hawks.

“Get them! That’s our stuff!” roared from the previously-jovial crew, and Mu scrambled to her feet and ran-

Then skidded to a halt as a throwing knife whirled through the air a foot from her face.

Throat tight and breathing shallow, Mu looked back at the mercenaries, and Hattie nearly across the campfire, and oh shit, they were fast-!

No time for precision!

Mu faced the bonfire, spell spinning through her mind like second nature, and cast into it, whirling around and wrapping her cloak around herself and Snatcher.

Bolganone blazed from the middle of the already-burning campfire like a volcanic eruption, the screams of the mercenaries nearly drowned out by the rabid crackle of exploding hardwood and showering sparks.

Amidst the shouts of light-blinded mercenaries and the stench of burning leather armor, Mu bolted around the still-blasting campfire, nearly on all fours as she kept her center of mass low. A few stray cinders brushed against her exposed hands, but they felt hot, not burning. The fire magic affinity, she realized.

Her thoughts scattered just as sure as the sparks behind her as Mu nearly bowled into Hattie, clumsily yanking out the knife from her boot and blindly grasping for the rope that tied Hattie’s hands behind her back-

Just as the last of the rope fell free from her sawing blade, the hairs on the back of Mu’s neck prickled.

“Freeze!”

Mu heard the creak of straining bows before she turned around, agonizingly slow.

Three bows, all trained on the pair of teenagers at the edge of their camp. Less than twenty paces away- shit, there was no time to cast anything before the archers released.

“Now, do yourself a favor, and hand over the dragon,” the woman in Sniper’s apparel said levelly, arms holding the Silver Bow’s string back with almost no visible effort. “I’d hate to stain my record with a child’s blood.”

But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t. Mu’s stomach dropped out from under her, and she gripped Snatcher tighter to her chest-

Sudden as a lightning strike, Hattie’s warm hand closed around the dragonstone wrapped in Mu’s fingers, and the world exploded in fire.

Stunned by the backblow of flames in the oddest shade of violet, Mu gasped for breath and clawed her way back up, light and heat and the smell of lava rattling her senses.

Screaming-

A shrieking roar, like angry embers whistling up from a wildfire-

Fire finally fading to reveal-

“Get on!” the dragon snarled, nearly bowling Mu over as she lunged between her friend and the mercenaries, bristling black quills standing on end as her vivid breath burned a path through the campsite.

Mu grabbed for the spines on Hattie’s back, their rough texture scraping at her hands like gravel as she hauled herself up.

Just like mounting a horse, she thought, half-hysterically. Hattie was a little smaller than a horse, even.

The dragon lurched beneath her, and Mu yelped and ducked her head down as hot embers and choking smoke whipped up from the down-beats of Hattie’s wings.

Then the ground was simply gone, the burning scar of a ruined campsite vanishing behind them. Mu screwed her eyes shut and tried really, really hard to not think about how even the largest of Hattie’s spines were barely big enough for Mu to grip as the miles of forest sailed beneath them.

Wait. Miles. “Hattie! The horse! We have to get my horse!”

“What- Are you for real?!” Hattie’s voice had a faint echo to it, more felt than heard; her incredulity was obvious despite the odd draconic overlay.

“My stuff is there!”

Hattie’s hiss of exasperation and wing-roll made Mu yelp and cling on tighter, but she stooped like a gliding albatross to where Mu pointed nonetheless.

Horf, proving to be either the most empty-skulled beast in Omnoc or perfectly cannon-proofed, did not react to the dragon nearly his size landing heavily in front of him, wingbeats kicking up dirt clouds and spinning pine needles.

Mu’s knees nearly collapsed beneath her as she dismounted, the ground seeming to spin under her even after so short a time in the air. Unable to keep the frantic jitters out of her fingers, Mu hauled herself onto her horse’s back, holding onto the reins like a drowning man did to a life-line.

Just before kicking Horf away into a run, because that had been way too close- Mu looked back at her scaly fellow escapee.

Sunset-purple scales were hard to make out in the moonlight, but enough light seeped from above to highlight the dark horns and mane of long quills ringing the dragon’s upper neck. Glowing blue eyes blinked back at her curiously. “Well, what are you waiting for? You got your horse, I’ll follow behind.”

“That… might not be a good idea,” Mu admitted, thinking back to the crowd of mercenaries who were certainly not all dead. “They saw us take off, so they’ll be looking to the sky for you.”

Rows of fangs gleamed as Hattie opened her mouth to interject… and then closed, as her gaze fixated on the book that held Snatcher’s soul, now back in Mu’s sash where she had stuffed him entirely by habit. “... Okay, fine.” A flash of violet, and Hattie shook her now-human head out like a dog’s before scrambling up behind Mu like she was scaling a mountain. “Let’s go.”

Mindful of Hattie’s searing heat at her back, Mu pushed Horf into a gallop, tearing across the forest and away from the campsite.

--

The sun isn’t up yet, Mu thought to herself, But it will be soon.

Given the distance from the mercenaries, and the dark, and her horse’s heaving, sweat-stained flanks, Mu reined him into a particularly low-hanging copse of trees. “We’ll stop here.”

She almost expected Hattie to complain- she’d been just as storm-rattled by the encounter with people after the Princess’s bounty as Mu was. But instead the other girl untangled her arms from Mu’s cinder-seared cloak and slid wordlessly from the saddle.

Mu followed close after, looping Horf’s rein’s around a branch before habitually reaching-

“Hey! What are you doing with him?” Mu kept her indignance to a whisper- but only just.

Hattie hugged Snatcher’s open pages to her chest, defensively turning away from Mu. “None of your business! I can talk to him if I want!”

“But why just take him from me instead of asking-”

“Because he’s my dad!” Hattie snapped, pressurized smoke escaping from behind bared teeth.

Mu froze. Remembered, in flashes- half-human. Fire Dragon. The way dragons aged, and “can’t be older than eight hundred”...

She smacked one hand into her face. And then did the same with the other, for good measure. “Oh sweet Saints. We’re both so stupid.” Still hiding her shamed face in one hand, Mu waved the other vaguely in Hattie and Snatcher’s direction. “A Fire Dragon around the same age as his kid would be, who he’s looking for? Stupid, of course you’re them,” she muttered to herself.

Slowly, Hattie uncurled from around the book- her father. “You- you know? That he…”

“Yeah. It is- was- what he planned to do after getting rid of the Mafia and getting to his body.” Mu sat, heavily, feeling like parts of her might fly apart. Between the faceless princess and the reality of driving away the Mafia and the bodiless dragon that could seize either his own body or hers- it was too much. “Oh, hell, the body… the Mafia…”

Gingerly, Hattie sat next to Mu, absentmindedly rolling shed pine needles between her fingers as she spread Snatcher open in front of them. “We need to talk.” Red was stark against the paper, even in the thin light. “I… owe you an apology, kid.”

Mu couldn’t hide her flinch. She really, really didn’t want to do this right now, to be reminded of the exposed nerves that were her newfound realizations about the blood-pact.

The script seized painfully before continuing. “It’s- you deserved to know. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It was cowardly, and not befitting of my station as a lawkeeper.” Snatcher’s lines lashed across the paper like stitches on skin, becoming wholly less practiced than his painfully letter-strict apology. “Even if you never believe another damn word from me again, at least believe this- I would never, ever chain your soul to that fate. I would die before it!”

Both the admittance and the apology hurt in different ways- like lancing an infection with ice-needles. “Why should I believe you?” she said thickly.

“Because…” Snatcher visibly gathered his thoughts, odd sun-stained triangles and harsh lines teasing at the page-edges and reminding Mu of something… “The pact-spell- it can slay dragons, even the one whose blood it came from. Talons at throats,” he managed.

Oh- that ‘something’ the musing script-whispers reminded Mu of was Valflame, which Snatcher taught to her long before they approached his body.

Trust. The knowledge that keeping someone close to your heart meant they could burn you, the certainty that they would not.

Even as much as her anger at his deception foamed like fear in her gut, the thought of slaying someone she loved licking across her thoughts like a slit throat. “You- I would never- I don’t want to kill you!”

As if realizing the potential danger, Hattie lunged to sweep Snatcher away from between them, but froze at the bold blood-words that appeared.

“Then you understand.”

Thunderstruck, Mu stared at him. And tried not to cry, because she did understand, she would never swing the dagger he’d placed in her hands. As he would never strike at her.

He would die for his children.

“You suck,” Mu ground out, frustratedly scrubbing away the welling tears. “You’re not supposed to actually be an okay guardian.”

“I honor our laws, as I honor my deals. It’s- it’s my duty. To both of you.” The words splayed from one end to the other, pointing to both of the teenagers reading them.

“I honor my deals too,” Mu said, each word feeling like a lightning strike as she fisted her hands into her tunic. She’d thought about it, and after hammering out the facts like sheets of molten steel on a swordsmith’s anvil, she realized if she wanted the Mafia gone, she’d still need help.

(It still terrified her, more than anything else- the trust, and the need for help.)

This entire venture was a risk, from the moment the whimsical, violent spark of an idea came to her in the Pelan library. Better make it count. “So we’re getting you back to your body, and then we’re flying to the island and kicking the Mafia’s asses,” she declared.

“Kid, you don’t have to feel pressured to-”

“I’m not,” Mu cut him off, even as she knew it was a lie, at least in part, because the obstacles rising between them and their goals were pressuring them; just like it was a truth that she did, indeed, care for him, and felt cared for in return. “I make my own decisions.”

It was practicality. And loneliness. And love, and trust, burning and sharp and soft and hard-won as any battle.

“... You’re right. You do make your own decisions,” Snatcher finally responded, ponderous and heavy as a treading warship. “Your will is your own.”

And that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Trusting that her will would remain that way. “So now we just have to… find your body,” Mu said, belatedly realizing they still didn’t know where it was. In all the heartache and betrayal-bitter separation, however brief it was, she had forgotten that their venture to the Twilit Mountains was a resounding failure on that front.

“Um, I think I can help with that, actually,” Hattie spoke up, awkwardly jabbing a thumb in the direction from which they rode. “The mercenaries were really, uh, talkative.”

“That’s right, I heard them too.” Snatcher’s words were lighter, airy in the way Mu felt as her tears dried and their resolve to trust each other began to mend. “They were there for the princess’s bounty, and planned to rendezvous with her current location to get paid. They said…”

Hattie picked up where he left off, face grim. “She and her entourage set up camp near a dragon corpse she found.”

“No way- where-?”

“Someplace called the Subcon.”

“The Subcon?” Mu frowned, absentmindedly tapping Snatcher’s corners where he still rested in front of them in thought. She’d seen a lot of Snatcher’s blood-drawn Omnecian maps on their journey, but… “I’ve never heard of it.”

The text was small, faint as summer’s red breath, but the movement still caught Mu and Hattie’s eyes. “... I have. I know where it is. And I know why a dragon’s corpse is there.”

“It’s where I died.”

Chapter Text

Crackling fire. A waning sun. And three mercenaries, uncaring of the spirit-blue eyes of a captured dragon attempting to bore holes into their skulls.

“So, where exactly are we taking the kid? ‘Cause I would really like not to haul a dragon across the entire Saints-damned country to the palace.”

“What the hell- Cenna, all of us were supposed to be at the princess’s camp at Subcon while the boss hashed out the pay, so where the hell were you?”

“I’ll have you know, Madam Sasha, that I was attending to very important business back at our base-camp-”

“She was recovering from a hangover.”

“You- seriously? Well then, in that case, if you want to know what happened that time with the feather boa, and the doves, and the dancing girls, then Sar Griff over here-”

“You know what, both of you shut up, because I don’t actually want to know.”

“It’s not like you missed much anyway, Cenna. I kinda wish I had a hangover excuse too.”

“Oh?”

“The Subcon’s a nice enough place, I guess. Pretty, real quiet. But I swear somethin’ is haunted in there.”

“Oh, please, with the ghost stories again-”

“No, no, trust me! Sasha, back me up here!”

“... They’re right. Hell, it might actually be haunted, for all I know. Her Highness was there in the first place because she found a dragon’s carcass.”

“No way. Did you see it?”

“Are you kidding? Of course not, it’s not like her entourage parked right next to the damn thing. Though I wouldn’t have stayed around long enough to poke anyway- Princess Vanessa was way too… creepy.”

“Creepy how? Griff I can understand being jumpy, but you?”

“Yeah, something about her. I didn’t actually speak to her, but she’s just… off. Not even the normal noble-crazy! Just weird, like she was looking at us through the eyes of her own ghost.”

“...Oh no. I suddenly have a hangover again. I’m afraid I’ll have to hold down the fort once more.”

“Shut the hell up, Cenna.”

--

She trusted him. Both of them trusted him.

Snatcher still felt he didn’t deserve it. But he would try to be so, for them.

(The thought felt oddly warm, like points of hatchling-heat tucked between his wings as he used to shelter Halcyone- Hattie?- when he was still alive and she was so, so much younger.)

Snatcher was pulled from his thoughts by the stroke of a calloused finger on his paper as Halcyone traced the shape of Omnoc onto him. Obligingly, he bled the map onto the pages for them to see as his daughter planned aloud.

“Okay, so we’re here-” She tapped their rough location beneath the stars, just southeast of Twilight’s den. “-And you said the Subcon is here.” Another tap, all the way north, right at the northwestern edge of Omnoc’s Crown Bay.

Between the distance, and their pursuants… “We’re going to need to move fast. Either those mercenaries will be after us again, or they’ll go to the princess.” And though the thought remained unwritten, Snatcher privately thought the second possibility was the most worrisome. Anything a human noble wanted with a dragon couldn’t be good, and especially not one that had a reputation for being… off.

‘Like she was looking at us through the eyes of her own ghost.’

Snatcher ruffled his pages in a shiver, faint as the breeze over a forest floor. No, he did not want himself or the children anywhere near the princess’s silk-gloved claws.

“I don’t think Horf can carry both of us at the speed we would need…” Mu muttered in thought, leaning to push her shoulder into the girl sitting next to her- a steel-backed testing movement, rather than comfort. “Think you can keep up on foot, or can we risk you flying?”

Halcyone pulled a face- one which he sympathized with. Fire Dragons could fly long, straight distances, but their legs were meant more for swimming in lava and forcing territorial rivals to the ground, rather than arduous journeys on foot. “I’ll take the flying option, thanks.”

Before Mu could draw breath to argue- and Snatcher would bet that the contradictory impulse was half instinct at this point- he condensed his map into words. “You need to keep low- nearly touching the treetops with your belly scales, if you can. You’re small enough that any pursuers would think you a bird from a high altitude, but if they see you land it will be quite obvious you are not.”

“I’m not small,” Halcyone grumbled.

But you are, Snatcher wanted to say. You are small, still small enough to ride on my back like a nestling, still almost as small as you were when you were new and fragile enough to carry inside my jaws-

“Yeah, well, suck it up, shortie, because the objective here is stealth, not flying in dragonbreath blazing and letting everyone know where we are,” Mu cut across, reaching behind her to grab her bag and stuff the remains of their lackluster campsite inside- both teenagers had slept roughly, huddled up by the tree with no fire for fear of the light acting as a beacon.

“Excuse me?” Halcyone puffed out steam. “Maybe like this, but when I-”

“Kids, no,” Snatcher admonished- maybe someday he would allow them to sort out their differences in a nestmate-squabble, but today was not that day. “We need to get our tails in gear, unless you want to start worrying about an actual royal-backed pursuit, because that’s what will happen if the mercenaries beat us there and tell the princess!”

“Urgh, don’t remind me,” Halcyone shivered, as Mu visibly began packing even faster, camp remains haphazardly vanishing into the lumpy pack. “I heard she was kinda weird when I was actually hanging around the capital, but this? Is just creepy.”

“No kidding,” Mu snorted. “Even in Alces we heard some rumors.” She shivered, as if the ghost of winter trailed its fingers down her spine. “Omnoc is fighting a lot, right? I figured that’s what she wants dragon stuff for, and that’s… not good.”

“... Huh.” Halcyone looked like she was going to be sick, and Snatcher burned with the inability to even do something so simple as swipe a rough tongue across her back to relieve her worries. “I’m… really glad we got out okay. I flew over one of the Metropolitian battles a few years ago, and it looked nasty.”

“You were where?” Snatcher blurted, blood billowing like fire. In a warzone! She wasn’t even eight hundred yet!

“Oh, don’t worry, they won’t be a problem for us,” Halcyone waved him off, completely misinterpreting his very reasonable worry about her. “They stick to the east, and Lady Apolonia has been keeping them occupied for a few years. We don’t need to worry about them when we’re so far west.”

“Oh, definitely. I saw enough of their goons when I was crossing the border, thanks,” Mu agreed, and Snatcher’s view dimmed and shifted as she snapped him closed and hauled her still-sleep-stiff body into Horf’s saddle. “You ready to go?”

A faint flash of violet fire, glimpsed between the folds of Mu's cloak. Halcyone shook out and smoothed down her mane of quills, flexed her wings; it struck Snatcher, then, just how much she looked like he did as a drachling, scales a lighter purple, spines shorter and legs longer, eyes lightning-blue instead of a Fire Dragon’s usual gold- but still it ached, even as he was proud of how she’d grown, because he’d missed it.

Unknowing of Snatcher’s thoughts, Halcyone shifted on her paws, looking to the sky. “Let’s fly.”

--

They slowed, briefly, for a midday meal, Horf snatching mouthfuls of grass as the girls ate.

Snatcher couldn’t really do much, as they traveled. But it did give him time to think.

Unseen, with his covers closed and body tucked inside Mu’s pink sash, Snatcher’s blood swirled inside his pages like ink in water, both in the neat calligraphy of a planned proposal and the wordless slashed-scattered fire-blooms of a dragon whose heart-shape could not be expressed by anything other than red on paper.

Oh yes, he’d been thinking. About the future, and about forgiveness, and about family- and for once, those thoughts did not hold the sulfuric bite of bitterness that they had, trapped in a dark room on a distant island. About leftover nesting hormones that were never truly there, not with his paper body and centuries of isolation, the excuse solid as a fog-film blanketing his old home in Subcon.

Snatcher had also found his mind catching on the tale of Anankos the Forgotten like hook-seeds on a sheep’s wool.

It was one of the few stories told of humans and blood-pacts that did not end in a cautionary note- an enigma, rather than a warning. A very old enigma, indeed, in which a Silent Dragon, of the keenest mind and deepest wisdom among his pod, had given his blood to a human and called him ‘Brother’ before vanishing into the ocean’s impossible depths.

The pact, the Valflame spell, the journey across sea and land had not been made in the name of family. But maybe, just maybe, blood-pacts made as a form of adoption… Snatcher was considering some very old options indeed, so obscured by time and legend and cautionary tales that to consider those options would be thought the height of foolishness among his peers.

His peers, however, were dead or fled, and had no sway over his decisions. The only one who did hold sway over the proposal was Muriel herself.

… He would ask. Later. Snatcher was unsure about human adoption customs, or even if she would want it. But being given the choice was the whole point, wasn’t it?

After the Mafia- he’d never been to the Pelan isle before, surely it would be interesting. As it would be interesting to actually meet the humans Muriel spoke so fondly of- Luka, her teacher, spoken of with equal parts warmth and worry. High Sage Maradoth, dead but not forgotten. Apprentices, and her age-mates, and teachers…

Hell, he also could fly to the other side of the world, if he so wished, and see how Camellia’s descendants fared.

He wanted to see his kids’ families.

Venka was gone, and he’d found Halcyone already, and he’d, perhaps, even found another daughter, if she accepted him.

The future, despite their dire pursuit, glowed like an arctic dawn.

--

They set down for the night just before sunset, the horse’s sides sweaty and breathing hard.

Mu propped Snatcher up, pages open, against a rock, allowing him a wide view of the kids tending to Horf and setting up their campsite, sharing the single bedroll as a cushion from the hard ground as they attempted to soften up the travel rations with warm water- a necessary precaution, as he’d heard Mu swear they were hard enough to shatter even dragon fangs.

At least there was a fire this time, bathing their faces in warmth.

Mu wasted no time tearing into her dinner, but Halcyone simply looked between her bedroll-companion, and the fire, and-

“So, Dad. Why didn’t you come back?”

Mu choked on her jerky, pounding her chest to clear the cough away. Snatcher’s body went rigid as sheets of steel, caught completely flat-pawed.

“I… assume you died during the Crusaders’ War,” Mu said slowly, voice still rough from her coughing fit.

Snatcher could just slam his covers closed. Or take the out Mu had given him. But…

Trust. Truth. Lying had already hurt one of the kids so terribly- “It’s- I… do owe you an explanation for that.” Snatcher kept his script carefully spaced, neat as any court scribe’s words. “I left you with Cam, and flew down to where the alliance had requested my presence. The battle took me by surprise, and I was injured, but survived.”

“That’s it?” Halcyone asked, face pinched and sad.

“... Yeah, that’s it.”

“It’s just…” Halcyone fidgeted with her dragonstone, not meeting his paper ‘face’. “Mom’s writing always sounded so sure you were going to come back for a while, and…”

“Wait,” Mu interjected “You- if you didn’t die in battle, what…” voice small, she continued, almost as if she didn’t want to know the answer. “What could kill a dragon off the battlefield?”

Snatcher said nothing. Could say nothing, because there was the truth they were owed and there was the truth, raw and burnt black like frostbite, and if he wrote anything it would all bleed from his pages like a slashed artery-

Hattie gulped, eyes watery- and not from the campfire smoke. “If you survived, why didn’t you come back?”

The blood flowed as if from a slit throat. “Because she killed me, okay! Venka killed me, right there in our den, and I thank every damn power in this world that I was there and you were not!”

Silence. It stretched uneasily, only punctuated by the crackling campfire and the slow dawning horror on Halcyone’s face, cutting directly into Snatcher’s blood-bound soul as her hands came up to cover her mouth and her face fell. “Oh, Saints above. You mean- my other mom? She…”

Faintly, Snatcher caught Mu wordlessly mouthing “What the fuck”, and hysterically almost thought to scold her for her language.

“I would have come back for you if I could. I promised,” Snatcher wrote, heart heavy and emotions thick like congealing blood.

Suddenly Halcyone stood. A few steps, and then Snatcher’s view was obscured by closed covers and purple fabric pressed tight against his leather as tear-salt mixed with the blood-salt in his paper. “I’m glad I don’t remember her,” she whispered, faint as a dying breath.

Snatcher was grateful she did not remember, as well.

(Late into the night, their campfire dimmed to embers and Halcyone’s faint smoke-snores permeating the air, Mu gently extricated Snatcher from his daughter’s grip. She settled against the saddle on the ground, knees up, and held a miniscule fireball close to both her face and Snatcher’s exposed paper, like she was reading a book under the covers after lamps-out.

Her expression was far more grave, however, than that of an illicit reader. “Hey, um, Snatcher,” she whispered, careful not to wake Halcyone. “About your, uh- about Venka.”

Snatcher felt himself shrivel, all the way down to his glue. “... What.”

“It’s, um… is she- was she in the vault back home? In there with you?” Mu shivered. “It’s just- the Mafia raided the vault, and if she was in there, it could mean she’s out there, and…”

… Oh. “You don’t have to worry about that, kid. She wasn’t in there.” And thank the stars for that. Still, her fear of Venka wasn’t exactly misplaced, because the thought sent shivers down the cracked glue of Snatcher’s spine, too.

Cold, and iron-aching silence, and the guttering of his own heart like a candle left in a snowstorm.

If Mu noticed the little frost-spikes of shivering that marked his otherwise bright and confident writing, she didn’t remark upon it. “I’ll tell you a secret though, even if she was out there? You still don’t have to worry. I’ve kicked her tail once before, I can do it again!”

“... You’re sure?”

“Yeah, kid, I’m sure. You can trust me on this!”

“... And you keep your promises, don’t you?” Mu muttered to herself, extinguishing her firelight and stretching her legs out. “Thanks, Snatcher. See you in the morning.”

Mu set Snatcher back where she found him, lifting up Halcyone’s limp arm and resting it across his cover before returning to her watch. She did not see his response, but it was still there.

“You’re welcome, Muriel. Sleep tight.”

I always keep my promises.)

Chapter Text

Subcon didn’t seem very haunted, or weird, or desolate like Mu was expecting.

As they rode towards the dragon’s den, with Hattie seated behind her and Snatcher stuffed in her sash, Mu squinted through the trees, because if they were as close to his den as Snatcher said they were, that meant the royal entourage had to be just as near-

“Stop,” Hattie hissed- literally, the sound was so alike to a banana-viper’s that Mu almost elbowed her companion in the gut. “There- between those two trees.”

Mu followed her finger’s line of sight. Just barely visible, spring-shaded green compared to the summer-dark bushes and pine needles of the forest.

A tent. Which meant…

“If that’s the princess’s camp, then it means we’re close- they’re supposed to just be a mile or so out from Dad’s den.” Hattie brought her hand back to shade across her eyes, looking up. “... It’s midday. Do you think we’ll be seen if we go now?”

Mu thought about it. Night was easier to steal through the shadows in, true, but staying in one place waiting for the moon to rise was even more risky- and if these guys were anything like the goons back at home, then they patrolled, armed. “Nah, we should go for it, they might catch us if we wait too long. Although let’s go… really far around the camp.”

Hattie looked between the book in Mu’s sash and the sliver of a tent visible through the trees, fiddling with her dragonstone. “Yeah, no complaints there. Let’s go.”

“Let’s hope his directions are accurate…” Mu muttered under her breath. Though she had to admit Snatcher’s maps and instructions had gotten clearer with every step they took closer to his home and grave.

Definitely more narrowed down than all of the Omnecian coast.

It was the longest two-mile ride Mu had ever experienced, cringing at every crack or odd bark-scrape, even with Hattie to literally watch their backs.

Shed pine and leaf-litter began to turn to stone under Horf’s hooves, just as Mu nearly jumped out of her skin when Snatcher started trembling like a jar full of wasps.

Even before blood bloomed on the paper, Mu knew what it meant when she opened him. “We’re close, aren’t we?”

“Yes. The path- there’s several that lead through the trees to a clearing, that’s where the entrance is.”

Gravel crunched beneath booted feet as Hattie slid from the saddle. “C’mon, he’s too… conspicuous.”

Mu leaned to the side to look at Horf. “Yeah, you’re right. Big guy isn’t exactly into stealth.” She followed Hattie down to the ground, pausing to check that she had her knife- okay, Hattie’s knife- in her boot still.

“You, stay.” Mu pointed at her horse. He nibbled at her fingers briefly before realizing she had nothing for him, and contentedly snuffled along to graze at the tufts of green reaching out between stones.

Mu kept Snatcher open as they walked, carefully watching as the blood on his pages pooled thicker in the direction of his body- like following a compass. Occasionally, Hattie would nudge her to the side, or point out a fallen branch or a stone with a murmur. Otherwise they remained silent, still all too aware of the encampment that would be behind them by this point.

The trees thinned, exposing them to the summer sun that lit the clearing- huge, big enough for a dragon to land in.

And across the clearing, darkness. Stone rising from the ground like a leviathan’s maw, the stone at its tongue worn smooth but for the series of ragged clawmarks raking down it.

Mu looked at Hattie, and met her eyes. Grinned, and chased after the half-dragon as she broke into a run-

And slammed into Hattie as she skidded to a halt at the call of “Halt!”

Mu whirled around, ready to face down…

The single woman that stood way too close to them. When did she even get here? And how did we not hear her coming?

“That’s better,” the woman huffed, smoothing back errant waves of blonde hair that shaded bright eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding an old-fashioned hand-mirror. Did she come here straight from her fancy tent? “Now, tell me, what are two little miscreants like you doing here? This area is off-limits.”

Mu edged closer to Hattie, and moved Snatcher’s open book to one hand so she could grab for Hattie’s shoulder. Something about this woman… Standing there, alone, dark and cold as the sea-shadows lurking in the currentless ocean depths- it was like she wasn’t even breathing.

“Uh…” Hattie muttered, clearly fishing for an excuse that was not there.

The strange woman’s gaze snapped up to peer at Hattie, her red eyes contrasting to the green of the trees and the green of the grass and the green of her well-appointed travel clothing. “You… a little dragon, all this way out…” Her eyes drifted towards Mu. “Which means… that in your hand…”

Mu looked at the woman’s face. Really looked, like peering beneath the rippling moonlight on the ocean to see the little lives beneath the waves.

She shivered, and the searing point of heat that was Hattie’s grip on her arm tightened.

Mu felt cold as she looked into bright eyes, burning with something that belonged off the edge of the world. In those glass-red eyes she saw the darkness of the lunar eclipse, she saw blood on the snow. She saw the cold and the dark and the hunger. But those eyes weren’t looking at her. They were looking at what she carried.

“Is that- Lukianos?” The princess breathed, taking one tentative step forward. “I cannot believe… All this time, I have been searching, but to think you would be brought to me...” Her low voice carried across the mere ten yards between them, snow-soft and longing and utterly terrifying and when had she glided so close-

Hattie’s grip on her arm tugged her a step back for every pace Princess Vanessa took towards her, Snatcher’s book-leather creaking in her arms as she help him close; a death’s-grip to keep him away from the princess, and a shield to guard her from the sun-focused gaze of the Omnecian princess- red like love, and fresh blood, and a stopped heart. “H-how do you know that? Who are you?” Hattie demanded, childish squeak in her voice betraying a drachling’s fear.

“Ah, I apologize, where are my manners?” The woman straightened into a stiff bow, shallow enough to barely be called one. “Normally you would be speaking to Princess Vanessa, but Her Highness is… in the backseat of the wagon, so to speak. I am Venka the Storm-Catcher, of the Ice clan.”

Mu stopped breathing.

“Now, this does not need to be difficult,” Vanessa- Venka- went on. “I wish to revive Lukianos as well, you see! It was kind of you to bring his soul all the way here, so that it may be reunited with his body, and with me.” She tapped a gloved hand to her chin, thoughtful. “And if he still hasn’t repented yet… Well, we can always try again!”

“Of course, if he goes and lets his original body die once more, there’s always more chances to make the point stick.” That thoughtful finger swept towards Mu, gesturing with courtly elegance. “He made a blood-pact with you, didn’t he?”

Numb panic dimmed Mu’s vision as she processed exactly what the dragoness meant to do. Over the thundering of her own heart, she heard Venka call “Oh, what is he saying in that book? Has he learned his lesson?”

Hattie was snarling like a bonfire, her hand not currently holding Mu’s arm hooked into a claw as she shoved the other girl to the side and behind her.

Between Hattie’s protectively-hunched shoulders and Mu’s bloodless face, red blazed across paper, jagged and panicked as cracks of lightning.

“I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you if you touch her, if you touch any of them, I'll scatter your ashes so far your ghost will never find peace-!”

“If you won’t give him to me…” Gentle, deceptively so, sharp like sugar and sweet like poison. “Then I’ll simply take back what is mine.”

Skirling green wisps around Venka’s hand, like no spell-pattern Mu had ever seen-

“Move!” Hattie’s snarl burned in Mu’s ears as she was pushed violently away from the incoming magic, skidding to the ground as something roared past where she just was.

Mu flung herself back to her feet, Snatcher in hand, and shook the snow out of her hair, eyes frantically tracking the clearing for Venka or Hattie-

Snow?

The place where they had just been standing was iced over, delicate white dusting the grass laying frozen flat on the ground, as if caught in a wind-whorl.

And Venka was there, a spot of flawless green on flawless white, with flawless red staring straight at Mu as Fimbulvetr, the Ice Dragon pact-spell, wove between her fingers like diamond-dust-

And was interrupted by the whistle of wind on scales and superheated air, as Hattie’s spread wings blocked the sun for a breathless instant and sparks dropped from her teeth.

Venka twisted away with a gleam of firelight on ice as Hattie’s breath tore through the clearing, Fimbulvetr dissipating as her concentration did.

As Hattie wheeled away for another strafe, Mu grinned viciously, calling up the spell-formula for Bolganone and aiming for Venka, because there were two of them, and Hattie had the aerial advantage-

Venka’s false benevolence darkened into cold-blooded rage. The breezes tickling the clearing became frigid, Mu’s breath fogging in front of her, and something in the dragoness’s eyes struck Mu’s heart like a poisoned blade, chest constricting with a fear too big for her body, because suddenly all she could think about was what Venka threatened to do.

Mu’s spell died in her mind, feet and instincts running faster than her brain as she fled, skidding to crouch behind an ancient pine as cold wind screamed around her like a live, fanged thing.

Fimbulvetr hit just as she’d tucked the rest of her body behind her tree-barrier- and even then, she wasn’t quite fast enough, a streak of blazing white cold burning across her lower leg as if the sturdy fabric wasn’t even there.

Mu flung her arms over her head as the frozen boughs of the tree groaned, snapped, and shattered, wood flinging sword-splinters that smoked cold fog across the clearing.

“I beat her once before, I can do it again.”

He had promised.

Mu flung open Snatcher’s covers, shivering fingers- from fear or from chill?- nearly tearing at the edges. “Snatcher what do we do!?”

“The spell, use it- wait, no!” Snatcher’s jagged correction cut off Mu as she scrambled to her feet. “We don’t know how many people she made pacts with, we can’t just kill her or she’ll hop to someone else!”

Hop to someone else- blood-pacts with humans- possession- imprisonment- Snatcher was a book, so- “Can we put her in something? Like you’re in?”

Mu cringed as Venka’s call sparked like the scrape of a sword on ice. “I can smell you out there, little vessel! You cannot- gyah!”

Mu lurched around her shattered shelter to catch glimpses of Hattie’s fire as she swooped down for another pass, swift as a stooping falcon.

“You need- that knowledge is supposed to die, it destroyed us to trust it to humans-!”

“Just trust me!”

Shrieking, and the roar of wild magic that was laced with cold-fog and spirit-blue light instead of the ubiquitous green of normal Wind spells, a frost-fanged cyclone the size of a whole warship-

Hattie’s beating wings carried her away- almost. Wings fully spread, she crashed and skidded into the newly-snown clearing, the trailing edges of leathery wings gleaming with fresh ice. She heaved to her feet, heavy wings frantically flapping as she pelted to the unguarded entrance to Snatcher’s cave.

A thundersnow-snarl, and Venka lashed out her arms and clenched her fists, sweeping the glittering snow of the clearing across the cavern entrance and freezing it into a barrier as thick and solid as the Alces wall.

“Here, now hurry!” Blood-desperate scarlet ink cut across Snatcher’s pages like lightning, or like a formula-

The blood-spells were devastatingly simple, more feeling than any actual skill. Four bloodbound curses, which Mu somehow recognized as the pillars of transference, death, creation, and binding- only one of which she could actually use, as a human.

Mu had one shot at this before Venka caught her, or killed her, and Mu wasn’t sure which one was worse but she had to make sure this counted…

Making her power count. Singed hair and shaking hands that caught her when the blowback of her Fire magic threw her off her feet, and a formulaic tweak to the equations of her spells that was the first thing Luka taught her, back before he was even a teacher.

She knew what she had to do.

Mu stuffed Snatcher into her sash and ran, waving an arm and yelling “Hey! Leave her alone, you big lizard!”

Blessedly, Venka turned away from the grounded half-dragon, and the full force of her comet-red glare nearly crushed Mu under its weight.

Lips curled into a snarl that showed far too many teeth on a human face, Venka raised her hand, the spark-lines of Fimbulvetr sweeping around her like stars.

But she was a dragon’s soul, in a human’s body, using a human’s magic. Mu was faster.

Mu released the numbers and odd-angled equations and magic that spun in her thoughts, in her blood, in the heated fog of her breath in the unnaturally-cold air. The tethering function tied all the numbers and fractions and odd draconic notations from Mu to Venka.

A line of white power split the awareness of every mind on the battlefield, and each heartbeat stretched out into aeons as the world held its breath. Glowing red like cracks in dried lava traced themselves in a perfect triangle around the dragoness, large enough to enclose an entire merchant’s home.

The grass in the triangle smoldered for a brief moment before Valflame exploded.

Fire screamed like the dying, erupting from the now-magmatic ground like a sun-flare reaching for the sky. Mu squeezed her eyes shut and yelped as the explosion of steam- steam?- carried her off her feet, and she huddled beneath her cloak as the lava-bright heat almost seared her.

For an endless moment she saw nothing, heard nothing but the storm-roar of impossibly hot fire ringing in her ears.

Then, she cracked open a smoke-stung eye, looked up from her hands and knees, and gazed upon what she had wrought.

Smoldering black like the site of a meteor strike, the clearing was nothing but ashes and heat-scoured ground that glowed with cinders and a steaming circle around a fallen woman, the rotten ice from her half-finished spell melting into nothingness around her.

And the woman was breathing, blessedly- that half-cast Fimbulvetr was probably what saved her life, Mu thought grimly.

Boots slipping on ashes and catching on still-burning earth, Mu skidded to her knees by the fallen princess whose fingers, streaked with fresh burns, were helpless against the girl’s prying hands.

Mu dropped the cracked mirror to the ground in the same movement as she yanked Hattie’s knife from her boot and slashed it across Venka’s seared palm, dribbling the blood over the mirror’s glass.

Mu brought forth the blood-magic that brought the dragons to their knees in the Crusaders’ War, given to her under the shadow of fear of death but no less meaningful for it.

“You can trust me on this!” Snatcher had said. About protecting them from Venka, and about the blood-pact’s possession.

“Just trust me!” Mu said moments ago, about the pillars of draconic blood-magic and the pact-spell itself, the means to kill and imprison that dragonkind wanted humans to forget.

Trust. The word felt like it wanted to crawl down Mu’s throat and tear into her heart and burn out the venom of Venka’s threats. It burned, welcoming and soft and carrying her on the wings of a crown-fire as Venka’s severed soul bucked beneath Mu’s will as she forced it back into the mirror.

Mu’s fingers were freezing when she lifted them away from the mirror. Vanessa- and it was the princess, her draconic puppeteer now trapped in the blood that seeped in the cracks of the hand-mirror- was still, panting and groaning in pain as she tried to curl burnt hands into fists.

Mu still knelt there, shivering, one bloody hand holding the mirror and the other holding the knife, when Hattie nearly bowled her over with her snout. “Hey, we gotta move! We have company!”

Mu looked up, lurching out of her fugue to focus on the line of royal guards tricking from between the trees into the clearing. The princess’s entourage.

Mu glanced at the bloodied knife in her hand. To Princess Vanessa, on the ground and burnt. Back to the guards. Uh-oh. This doesn’t look good…

Mu slowly climbed to her feet, and the ring of steel on leather sheared through the unnaturally silent clearing.

“You there, halt!”

Absolutely not. Instead Mu scrambled onto Hattie’s back, hissing in pain as the frostburn bit at her leg once more. “The cave!”

Hattie lurched beneath Mu into a run, and her claws left furrows into the ashen ground as she ground to a halt before the ice barrier.

Mu’s face nearly slammed into purple spines at the sudden change in velocity, and where her arms were wrapped around Hattie’s neck, the dark scales began to heat beneath her hands.

Hattie’s fire breath streamed like the tail of a comet, boring a hole into the ice as steam screamed like a fanged beast.

It was just small enough for a teenage drachling and her human passenger to wiggle through.

Mu clung even tighter, mirror and knife gripped in hands wet with sweat and blood, as Hattie bounded blindly through the cavern, the scrape of her claws echoing eerily against lonely stone.

When Hattie skittered over loose stone into a yawning inner chamber, at first Mu’s heart sank. This had to be his den, so where-?

Remembering the star-stone imitations of constellations that lit Twilight’s home, Mu sat up, stuffed the mirror into the sash, the knife back into her boot, and lit a bright flare in her palm.

And looked up.

Scales dark as a winter night, lashed with blood-rust stippled chains that suspended the dragon like fly in a great spider’s web. Perfectly preserved in the cold, long armor plating seeming to sag against starved ribs, chains digging obvious welts into his hide, and wrapped around his snout…

Mu was unable to stop herself from sliding off Hattie’s back as the half-dragon leaned back on her haunches to stare. “Dad…?” she whispered.

Keeping the weight off her burnt leg, Mu tore her gaze away from Snatcher’s corpse like one would tear a leech from skin. “Untangle what you can, I’ll take care of the bolts in the wall,” she commanded, low and urgent and desperately keeping the tremble out of her voice.

The spells came to her like breathing, and though Bolganone was perhaps a bit excessive, it was explosive enough to shatter the stone that had begun to crumble under the tonnes of dragon it suspended.

And it’s not like stealth mattered much anyway, Mu remembered uncomfortably. Because if Vanessa’s soldiers weren’t here now, they would be very soon.

Splintering limestone, the heavy clunking rattle of chains being shoved off an enormous snout as Hattie did her work, and then-

Mu backpedalled out of the way, and was still nearly blown off her feet as the dragon corpse crashed to the ground, shaking the earth beneath them and blowing stinging clouds of gravel into Mu’s face as she covered it with her arm.

Mu lowered her arms, and stared, because this close up, Snatcher was even bigger than she’d thought. Wings long and wide as a galleon’s sails splayed limp across the stone floor, and thick, segmented rings of black armor plating cascaded down a neck that was as thick around as Mu was tall, the long heat-vents lining it large enough to lose a person in. The quills that ringed his upper throat were so much like Hattie’s, but long, and sharp, like a whaler’s harpoons.

This is what the Crusaders fought against? And won?

A thud of paws on stone behind her, and a snout shoving her forward and up, forcing Mu to use the wide scales as handholds as she climbed to the dragon’s back and Hattie chanted, panicked, “Get up get up get up, the guards are here!”

Mu crouched on Snatcher’s wide, unbreathing back, and glanced briefly at the cave entrance while Hattie scrambled up behind her.

Barely there, the silhouettes of Vanessa’s royal guards appeared at the chamber entrance, dark on dark with the gleam of sharp steel marking each soldier.

They were out of time.

Mu ripped Snatcher- his soul- out of her sash and spun Hattie’s knife out of her boot to slice it across her palm; and she wasn’t sure how she knew what to do but she did, pressing one hand to the voided scales she rested on and one hand on the book that held his soul.

It was like trying to thread a river through the eye of a needle- lava screaming through her veins instead of blood and in from the book, out from her heart, onto the bloodied handprint on a dragon’s armor-

The book slid off the dragon’s side-scales, falling to the ground with a lifeless thump.

Mu nearly followed it, slumping against the dragon’s back as she panted for breath, limbs weak as jellied seaweed.

And then the world lurched beneath her as one hundred and thirty feet of night and magma and the crack of lightning between smoke-storm clouds stood up.

Faintly, through the halo of cotton-padded exhaustion, Mu heard the guards panicking.

“Move,” she felt more than heard Snatcher’s voice, the rumble of thunder chasing his words.

Shakily, Mu looked ahead- and from her high vantage point, the royal guards looked tiny, their swords laughable toothpicks in the face of an adult dragon. To their credit, they stood their ground, terrified as they were.

Derisively, Snatcher strode through them, and they scrambled away lest they be squished into soldier-cakes on the stone.

Light, faint and watery through the still-standing ice barrier. Snatcher stopped.

A faint rumble from beneath the dark scales she rode on, like Mount Falamand in a really bad mood. Black arced in front of Mu as Snatcher flexed his neck and his quills and his sword-length spines, vents like gills flaring a hellish red-orange-

An odd, multifold hum, like the sound of an ember whizzing through the air, made large and deep as a whale’s call. The armored vents lining Snatcher’s neck snapped shut, and Mu had the sense to cover her eyes before she was blinded.

The ice barrier in front of them didn’t melt. It exploded, screaming away into steam and shattered fractals.

There, on the ash-cool ground of the clearing, lay the princess, sat up and surrounded by flitting clerics armed with Recover staves- who shrieked in terror at the beast that now loomed over them like Death did over doomed cradles.

“Get off me,” Vanassa- just Vanessa, with Venka still imprisoned in the mirror Mu had in her sash- commanded, elbowing off a cleric as she rose to her feet.

“But, Your Highness-”

“If he wanted to kill us, we’d be dead already.” Red eyes framed by reddened burns tilted up to glare at the trio. The healing had done miracles for her, but Mu could still see seared-red skin, stretching and curling around her hands and fingers where the gloves had scorched and threads melted into skin. “Which I find quite unusual. You are a fickle creature, a wrathful one, are you not?”

Snatcher snorted, sending the frightened healers skittering and blowing gusting clouds of ash around the humans below. “I doubt I would need to, unless you do something truly stupid again. Like making a blood-pact with the Storm-Catcher.”

Echoed gasps, fear-struck mutterings, and panicked questions of “Your Highness, is this true?”

Princess Vanessa ignored them all. “So what if I did?” she hissed. “We understand each other- she was a far better ally than those lying little lordlings and ladies of the court, who proved more likely to stab me in the back than even entertain the thought of contracting with me!”

What? Mu gaped. Did she let Venka take over on purpose?

“And you! You should have told her- Venka. People who fail tests of love deserve to be motivated by fear! And you failed her,” Vanessa continued, waving unsteadily at the dragon who was close enough to snap her between his fanged jaws, let alone blast her into a pillar of ash on the spot.

Definitely not just normal noble-crazy. “Are you serious?” Mu blurted out, the net between her mind and her tongue long burnt away by the exhaustion of channeling a dragon’s soul. “Even I heard about the execution-exiling thing!” Exasperated, she threw up her hands, wobbling a bit before Hattie’s snout braced her from behind. “Saint Mercy above! Maybe people don’t like to be around you because you pull that kind of shit, huh? Ever think of that?”

“How dare you!” Mu shrunk back against Hattie’s solid scales when war-red eyes focused on her rather than Snatcher. “We were going to give Lukianos a second chance! I was going to find my prince, give him a second chance!”

“Some second chance,” Hattie muttered from behind Mu, voice bitter as smoke.

Wisps of half-calculated Wind magic fogged around Vanessa’s damaged hands, and Snatcher straightened, wings tenting. “You know what? I don’t have to listen to your excuses. Count your blessings I don’t wish to court war with Omnoc’s queen, human.”

The world swung beneath Mu as Snatcher bent low, almost as if bowing, and Hattie shoved her down against Snatcher’s back and hissed “Hang on!”

Mu gripped the low, dull inner spines along Snatcher’s back.

Starless black spread. Snapped in a slow, powerful downbeat, the boom of it cracking in Mu’s ears like sails snapping in the wind.

Like riding a storm-wave on a ship, warm scales rocked beneath Mu, the force of their ascent pressing her further down as each thunderous wingbeat took them higher, and higher, until…

A fanged, grinning snout nudged at Mu. “Hey, you can look up now.”

Mu chanced a look back at her companion. Hattie’s face grinned back at her, jaws half-cracked open and eyes squinting happily in the warm wind as she gripped her father’s spines in her own claws, little wings half-spread in a mirror Snatcher’s gliding.

Wait. Warm wind?

Mu turned back to face the front, the hot air from the vents lining the sides of Snatcher’s spine spilling warmth over them and driving away the blistering gales of high-speed flight.

She looked further.

Beneath Snatcher’s barely-beating wings, the whole world splayed out beneath them, trees vanishing behind them at speeds horses could only dream of. She felt as if she could touch the entire world, and never be touched in return.

It was the most incredible thing Mu had ever seen.

--

“Back-rides are for young drachlings, not human teenagers with illusions of grandeur.”

Chapter Text

Ilah landed heavily on the chill ground of Ice Clan territory, shaking her spines out and flaring her fins. The Ice Chief emerged from the shadowed eave of their den, acknowledging their visitor with a shallow head-dip. “Ilah, the Judge. It is my pleasure to greet such an elevated lawkeeper, but I must ask- why did The Immovable request that all the lawkeepers be recalled to their leaders’ territories?”

“Has the news not reached you yet?” The command had indeed been sudden, and admittedly Ilah believed it had also been too hasty. She, like all lawkeepers, was beholden first to the draconic laws and impartial sentencing, rather than to clan chiefs. “In the aftermath of the recent battle in the south, one of the fatalities never recovered- even after calling the soul to return to the body, they remained dead. The body should have still been inhabitable…”

“-And the only ones who know how to permanently sever the ties of soul and body are lawkeepers,” the Ice Dragon finished for her. “And I assume there was no council of judgement, or sentencing for this dead dragon? Damn.”

Ilah could sympathize with the troubled pin of their fins to their neck. It took much to render a dragon’s body unable to house their soul anymore- Grima, of legend, had pulled their body back together, fully formed, from just their dried skeleton after they were slain early in their lifespan. Almost any dragon who died an unnatural death could return to this world once more, so long as there was another to channel their soul back into their body.

That this particular war-fatality could not return… it worried Ilah. Tacitus had requested all active lawkeepers be recalled to be questioned by higher-ranked ones in their faction, such as Ilah herself. He had posited that perhaps a lawkeeper had gone rogue, and wielded the closely-guarded secret of the pillar of death extrajudicially, without a full judgement or council from other lawkeepers or even a criminal charge.

It was a reasonable conclusion. A logical one, given the precedent set by Tempus the Incandescent’s betrayal.

As Ilah strode into the vast cavern, lit firepits carved into the walls reflecting off green scales, she was not so sure.

The muttering circle of Ice Dragons- and one Fire Dragon, who may have been born of flame but was the Ice Chief's daughter’s mate, and thus under their jurisdiction- turned as one to look at Ilah, their circular huddle resembling a pack of gossiping grandparents rather than judicial professionals.

Ilah looked down to see what they were huddled around so tightly.

A little smear of purple scales, rearing up on unsteady hind legs and flapping too-big wings to grab at the webbed paws of a cooing Ice Dragon, who looked up somewhat guiltily at Ilah’s unimpressed look before returning to playing with the drachling.

Given there was only one other Fire Dragon in the den… “Really, Soul-Snatcher, you brought your child?”

His response was a level stare, his line of sight unbroken as he scooped up the drachling and held them close to his chest. Ilah could excuse the low threat of the maintained eye contact, though- the fact that he’d had a child at all was miraculous, so such polite wariness was understandable.

“The Storm-Catcher is... otherwise occupied, so I took my child with me. I hope there isn’t a problem, Judge?”

“Mm, no. With all hope, this matter will be resolved swiftly, and only with words. Now…”

None of them were aware of if another of their number had used the exclusive knowledge of a lawkeeper to execute the war-fatality without a judgement. But still their gazes shifted, bodies rigid like they were stuck on rotting ice. ‘Did you know?’ was asked with careful glances and faint hisses, soft as silk over steel.

Ilah was not surprised none of them were aware. Tacitus may have concluded it was another betrayal, still stung as he was by Tempus siding with the humans.

But Ilah was not so sure. She left with no more answers than when she arrived; left with nothing but a stone-heavy curl of worry in her gut, because something told her this would not be the last instance of such a mysterious death.

--

Snatcher’s wings began to fail him thirty miles out from Alces.

His joints did not burn from exhaustion but instead numbly trembled in weakness, and Snatcher was forced to contend with his own physical body for the first time in centuries; the fire-flex of elation at the ability to move under his own power was dimmed by the realization that his body was in poor condition from his death, and he could not ride the updraft of his revival for much longer.

Like trying to beat against ocean waves, the downbeat of his wings faltered, and it was all he could do to keep them stiff and gliding as the Omnoc’s thick forests approached far more rapidly than he expected.

He was only able to warn the children as his extended talons brushed against tree-tips, his voice catching oddly as his words exhaled as breath and words instead of blooming as blood on paper. “This is going to get bumpy!”

Snatcher angled further up, like a ship catching shearing sea-winds as his wing-joints stiffened and locked. Trees that only tickled his claws beforehand were smashed to splinters against his armored chest as he skidded to a halt on the ground, hard.

Legs that trembled beneath the effort of clawing a full-grown dragon to a halt collapsed, and Snatcher’s breath shuddered as he laid his head on the earth and focused on breathing, just managing to drag flutter-weak wings back to his sides.

He’d forgotten how much just having a body ached.

A fly’s weight shifted on his back. “Holy shit…” Mu trailed off.

Laboriously, Snatcher raised his head from the ground and turned back to match what she gazed at.

Like a crashing comet’s trail, the entire swathe of ancient pine forest behind them was shattered, jagged tree stumps and fallen boughs littering the path.

Oops. That was more noticeable than he’d hoped.

“I… guess we’re making camp here.” Halcyone tilted her muzzle to the still-bright sky, squinting. “It’s still a few hours ‘till the sun starts to set, but I doubt anyone can catch up to us.”

“... Yes, we will camp here,” Snatcher rumbled, turning to rest his head on the forest floor once more. Exhaustion shivered down his spines like rain, like he’d been clinging to flotsam in a hurricane and only barely been hoisted to shore before he drowned.

He’d starved to death, chains and ribs alike stretching against armored scales. It left him weak, and he couldn’t be weak, not when he had two children. His muzzle worked into a snarl, cut off with a soundless hiss as it pulled at new-old scars criss-crossing his snout where winter-cold chains had dug.

Halcyone glided from his back and swarmed around Snatcher’s face, Mu a spot of bright red on her back. “Dad, it’s- are you?”

Snatcher blew a friendly bubble of warmth into her concerned face, sniffing around her and nosing under her wings- Fire Dragons were made of stern stuff, and her wingtips should be fine, but he had to be sure- before pulling himself back away.

He needed to expend less energy, needed a smaller body.

Fire and smoke and obsidian-cut scales folded down, and down, and down, until the fire faded and Snatcher was left kneeling on the forest floor on human knees.

He looked up to see Mu slide from Halcyone’s back and lean against her, keeping the weight off her leg as they approached him.

And yelped, forced to let go of her crutch when Halcyone darted forth and almost crashed into Snatcher, facial spines digging into his gut as she pressed her face into his side and crowded against him as much as she could.

Heatless flame passed over Snatcher’s rough tunic and tickled his face, leaving him with an armful of teenage dragon who was clinging just tight enough to be sure he was real. Gently, he smoothed down the hair along the nape of her neck, where her mane of quills would be if she was not human-shaped.

He’d actually found her. Alive, and unharmed, and as far as he could tell from offhand remarks about her family, loved. It was more than he ever could have hoped for. And, also alive…

Mu visibly tried not to look awkward, eyes shifting away from the crack of emotional vulnerability. Snatcher was suddenly, vividly reminded of a young Fire Dragon who did not ask for comfort but instead would linger outside the den like smoke trapped in a fireplace, waiting for his parents to grab him by the scruff and pull him inside with them.

“You know, it’s been a rough day for me. I could use a hug,” he called, reaching out with his arm not currently holding his daughter.

Hesitant and uneven- Snatcher remembered Fimbulvetr lashing across her calf as she was too slow to take cover- Mu approached closer. Slowly, with a shuddering exhale, she knelt next to them, and bonelessly leaned into Snatcher.

“We’re alive. She can’t get us,” Mu whispered- more to herself than anything. But Snatcher still pulled her tighter, a bark-scratchy purr rattling in his chest- full and reassuring and nothing like the pale shadow of a dragon’s churrs to their offspring that he had attempted to convey as a book held in Mu’s bloodstained arms, mere miles out from the Gates of Paracos, while she slept off the vulnerary and the injury.

“Yeah, kids, we made it.” Then, head dipped, he murmured “Thank you.” For finding my daughter. For allowing me into your life. For being you, unbound and wind-wild and free to make your own choices.

He resolved to talk to her later, about adoption and historical precedent and Anankos the Forgotten’s tale. He didn't know much about who might be waiting for her on the Pelan Isle, in the convent or otherwise. He also didn’t know where Halcyone and himself would go, after holding to his end of the deal.

Best to wait.

--

Mere moments after moving as far away as reasonable from their tree-torn landing site, and settling down around a campfire built out of mindless habit, all three travelers simultaneously realized something as the sky dimmed with sunset.

“We forgot the horse,” Halcyone groaned, clapping herself in the face with an exasperated palm.

“And our money, and bedroll, and food,” Mu bemoaned back, collapsing onto her back, limbs spread dramatically. “At least we have Snatcher’s musty old waterskin, so we won’t dry out like seaweed.”

Snatcher frowned, affronted. “I’ll have you know the water I have is perfectly drinkable.” Probably. Far as he understood it, a dragon’s clothes and items worn on their person were stored as energy in their dragonstone, same as their draconic mass and power were stored in the stone when in human form. It should be potable.

“I can try hunting,” Halcyone offered. “There’s probably something that came back after the crash scared everything off.”

“Oooh, meat sounds so good right now,” Mu mumbled from her face-up position, punctuated by a faint grumble from her stomach.

Right. Halcyone was old enough to hunt by herself now- old enough to do most things independently, really; the dichotomy between her now and Snatcher’s memories of a scaled slip of a drachling still felt jarring. “Just be careful,” he said.

A flash of fire, a gust of wind, and she was gone.

Shrugging his cloak away to free up his hands, Snatcher leaned over to poke Mu’s foot where she still lay on the ground. “You alive over there, kid?”

“No,” she grumbled. “‘M tired.”

Understatement of the year. “Uh-huh,” he agreed mildly, brushing calloused fingers over her pant leg, and wincing in sympathy when she hissed in pain. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. C’mere.”

He scooted closer, and Mu didn’t flinch when he unbent her leg to rest it on his own crossed ones. She did, however, sit up in an obvious pain-wince as Snatcher rolled her pant leg up.

Mu winced as the wind-lash of puffy, pale skin ringed in red came into view. “Oh, that’s… definitely not good.”

“Hmm. The skin is still alive, at least.” Snatcher pressed the back of his hand briefly to her leg to test the temperature before she swatted it away- warm, not the pale chill of dead flesh. “Since we left all our stuff behind, there’s not much to do besides let it heal. So it will scar, I’m afraid,” he added apologetically.

“Eh, I’ll just add it to the collection.” Mu waved her arm around before rolling down her pant leg and fully sitting up.

Ah, yes. The knife. Passively, he recalled the ideas he polished like blades in lieu of sleep as Mu rested during their journey after crossing the Gates. Sir Amos would die for that. Violently. A shame that Princess Vanessa’s political position shielded her from a similar fate.

He voiced none of that. Instead, he unhooked his waterskin from his belt and tossed it to her. “Here, you’ll need to drink something.” Then, wiggling his fingers in his tunic pockets, he plucked out an old coin- one of numerous. “For now, tell me if these are still good for trade. We can stop by the next town and resupply, hopefully.”

That was how Halcyone found them when she returned, a pair of rabbits dropping from her jaws without care. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out if we can actually buy things with these.” Snatcher beckoned her over from where he sat by the pile of coins that Mu was scrutinizing.

“I think we can? Most port towns accept Pelan money, which was what I was using before. But this is Omnoc money that doesn’t even look like Omnoc money, it’s so out of date…” Mu muttered.

Softened quills brushed Snatcher’s shoulder and caught on his hair as Halcyone slithered her neck over him. “I mean, it’s gold, right? In my experience, gold is gold and anyone will accept it.” A pause. “They still might try and scam you, though.”

“Somehow that doesn't surprise me,” Snatcher snorted. Turned his head to the side, and blew a hot steam-breath down his daughter’s facial scales, smoke-sweet with praise. “Good job with the hunting, this should be more than enough for all of us.”

He couldn’t hide the faint grin, even as Halcyone almost bowled him over from her thrilled full-body wiggle. She’d been raised by humans, certainly, but some reactions to a draconic parent’s body language were encoded far deeper than memory, like any living creature’s. And perhaps she was a bit old for such early-life affections, but Snatcher was making up for lost time.

Mu, for her part, eyed the rabbits. “Just making sure, but- we are going to cook those, right?”

“I mean, we don’t have to, if you don’t want to…” Snatcher trailed off.

Dramatically, Halcyone picked up after him, head drooping dramatically to the side. “Aw, you mean humans don’t like their food raw and bloody?”

“Yes, you’re hilarious, okay.” Mu rolled her eyes. Slid the knife from her boot, and pulled one of the dead rabbits to her by the ears. “Glad we’re not planning on keeping the skins, you really did a number on them.”

“Hazards of being a dragon. Pass me the other one, will you?” Snatcher said, pulling out his own knife; the single-edged blade had been popular seven centuries ago, and though he hadn’t seen the need to carry one around, even in human shape, Camellia had insisted.

(Halcyone looked so much like her mother, in the fading fire of sunset. It made her freckles darker, her hair red, and her eyes a brighter ghost-blue.) At least Mu certainly knew what she was doing. Snatcher himself hadn’t dressed a kill with his own hands in ages, and as readily as the knife-strokes came to him, his hands still ended up bloodier than he would like.

Once rabbit meat was skewered across the campfire, Snatcher didn’t bother to clean his hands quite yet, instead carefully chewing on slivers of bloody liver. Mu made a face, but didn’t comment. Dragons may prefer to cook their food, but raw meat never hurt anyone.

Snatcher was uncomfortably aware that he needed everything from the richest parts he could get his claws on. His old tunic and cloak sagged uncomfortably loose on his form, now.

Mu pulled a face when Halcyone cracked open a bone and slurped out the marrow. “Oh, come on, that’s gross,” she complained, wiping her own bloodied fingers off on the edge of her cloak.

Blood on her hands. Blood on a knife beside her.

Shit. He’d almost forgotten.

“Muriel. Do you still have Venka?”

Frozen, glacier-heavy silence, but for the crackling fire and roasting meat.

“... Yeah, I do.” Mu slid the cracked mirror from behind her back, setting it facedown on the ground and sliding away as if the mirror would bite her.

“Is she really in there?” Halcyone stalked toward it, fins and quills raised like hackles. Slowly, like preparing to strike down a snake, she poised one clawed paw above the comparatively-fragile mirror.

“Don’t!”

Halcyone’s paw stilled, both he and Mu turning to stare at him incredulously.

Swallowing the cold lump of glass that seemed to have taken up residence in his throat, Snatcher explained. “You can’t destroy the mirror. There’s still a blood-pacted human out there, remember? She’d just go right back to possessing the princess.” Snatcher recalled the faint, heart-flutter tug of his soul to Mu, and how easy it would have been to simply to move from one vessel to the other. “... And this won’t stop her for long, anyway. The blood-bind won’t keep her stuck in there for much longer than another day.”

Halcyone curled her claws back against her chest. “Yeah, okay, nope, not smashing it, then.”

Mu continued to stare at the mirror, troubled thoughts swimming like ocean currents behind her eyes. “... We should have killed Vanessa. With no intermediary to call her soul to her old body, or nobody to possess...”

Before Snatcher opened his mouth, Halcyone cut across. “Oh, no, I don’t know about what you hear across the ocean, but you do not want to piss off Queen Eilwyn.” Agitated tail-flicks, and a worrisome look eastward. “Omnoc’s standing army is huge, and Her Majesty is scary. The safest thing to do would be to keep our heads down while we’re still on the continent, and not give her a reason to invade once we’re on Pelan.”

Snatcher winced at the thought. Surely, soon the princess and her entourage would be returning to the Glacier Palace with news of mirror-spirits possessing the royal heir and a winged volcano flying free in their skies. These days, dragons weren’t exactly a common sight, after all. The news of her heir’s survival as well as possession ought to keep the queen occupied, but, well…

Snatcher resolved to feel out any news of Eilwyn’s movements once they had retaken the island. With luck she would be too preoccupied with the fallout of Vanessa’s actions and with the ever-burning war with the Metro, but if not…

Snatcher and Halcyone would need to keep themselves scarce.

Mu flung up her hands in obvious frustration. “Well, if we can’t kill Vanessa, and we can’t keep Venka in the mirror, what the hell are we supposed to do with her?”

“I… may have a way to remove Venka,” Snatcher said, the full gravity of his suggestion fraying at his nerves. “One of the blood-spells, far older than the spell of binding used to trap our souls.”

“Oh!” Mu’s eyes lit with realization, doubtless remembering the trio of intent-laden spells he’d shown her. “The dragonstone and death ones, right? Only dragons can do those, but that’s not an issue for us!”

“Well, yes, but also…” Snatcher trailed off, stacking his thoughts like balanced stones. How did he even begin to explain the sword-steel braid of duty and secrecy and vows? “I am- was- a lawkeeper, so I’m very familiar with the laws we govern ourselves by- including when they are broken, and what the sentencing was.”

The children were quiet, waiting for him to continue. “It was rare that such conclusions were made, but lawkeepers are required to be present for executions, and to carry out the sentence.” He gestured to himself, deep breaths puffing out smoke. “Dragons are very difficult to truly kill, so the specific ways to end a life permanently are kept well-guarded by a neutral party, oathbound to keep it secret.”

“... You were an executioner?” Halcyone asked, looking troubled.

“Of a sort, I suppose,” Snatcher relented. He would not lie to her; lawkeepers were meant to be unbiased, and a full Judgement required a whole flight of lawkeepers present to argue and present the case and evidence. But they did carry out the sentences they declared- they were, after all, supposed to be objective, and neutral, and balance the justice evenly among their peers.

“Oh, Saint Justice- hell. Those blood-spells were supposed to be secret?” Mu worried at the frayed hem of her cloak, averting her eyes.

“... They were, yes. If dragons were still around, I likely would have been relieved of my post,” Snatcher admitted. And cut off Mu’s guilty response with a gesture that trailed shimmering heat. “Don’t. I would do it again, always. But, well… I hope you understand when I ask that you take such knowledge to your grave.”

Mu nodded grimly, a dire understanding in her eyes.

“So…” Halcyone shifted closer to him, glancing down at the mirror that reflected the waning sun and the darkening sky. “Does that mean…?”

“Yes, it does. One dragon isn’t enough to preside over a Judgement, and I’m not exactly neutral, but, well…” He shrugged humorlessly. “I already broke my oaths anyway. Needs must, and all.”

And it did sting, like a gust of blizzard-breezes. He had trained as a lawkeeper for over a century, upheld all their ideals and vowed on their secrets.

Snatcher was not lying, though. He would still do it again- being an oathbreaker and a liar were small weights compared to the lives of his children.

He scooped up the mirror, its cold silver tingling against the thin scars across his hands, and stood. “I’ll take care of this. Do not follow me.”

Chapter Text

Hattie folded her fire back into her dragonstone, dusting off her tunic and flapping out her cape. “Okay, so let’s go follow him.”

Mu looked to where Snatcher had vanished between the trees, a brief frost-flutter of determination glinting in her eyes. “... Yeah. I’ll follow you.”

Hattie led the way, following her father more by scent than sight- it was getting dark, and the trees and brush were thick. Mu was unnervingly silent behind her, footsteps thief-light and soft.

Hattie’s ears pricked as Snatcher’s deep, steady voice reached her, and the moment she saw the black of his cloak she grabbed Mu and pushed her down behind the nearest bush they could find.

“Venka the Storm-Catcher, of the Ice Clan,” Snatcher said, voice canted in an oddly formal beat, staring down at the faceup mirror resting on the ground. “You have been found in contempt of the most ancient of draconic laws, written in stone and fire and ice and sea and light. This Judgement of one-” And here, his voice caught, and Hattie remembered how he’d said he already broke his oaths as a lawkeeper, and how one dragon wasn’t enough for this. “-will now sentence you.”

“You attempted to slay a child of your own kind, of your own nest- actions befitting the darkest of dragons in our history. You killed your own mate. You fully intended to stuff my soul into a child and torture her,” Snatcher snarled like a thunderstorm, the soul-shaking and gravity-tilting fury enough for Hattie to flatten herself further into the ground. “Any sane Judgement would condemn you in a span of a breath for this.”

Hattie nearly jumped when something warm and calloused touched her hand hesitantly. Equally hesitantly, she grabbed Mu’s hand back. Hattie understood- Venka scared her, too.

“But I’m willing to give you one chance, because I remember what we used to be like, and because enough dragons have already died.” That searing rage was tempered by something darker, ice-cut and chill. “I’m not unbiased, and I’m not worthy of the title of lawkeeper anymore, so I give you one chance. You can swear yourself in service of restoring peace between humans and dragons, and never look at any of us again. Or you can die.”

What? Those were- Hattie had no idea her father was thinking this big. She knew he was planning to fly to the Pelan isle to get rid of the occupying Mafia, sure, but this was huge. World-changing huge. When the hell had he come up with that?

“You do not have the right to judge me, Lukianos. Oathbreaker, traitor, liar.” Unfiltered by Vanessa’s tongue, Venka’s voice echoed like a lullaby in ice caves, delicate and refined. “You shall not kill me, my love. Did you not just condemn the very thing you are about to do to me?”

“That’s what I thought,” he muttered under his breath, before shaking out his head in a gesture that looked strange on a human. “So what would you have me do!?” Fists clenched, smoke streaming from where fingernails dug into palms. “Would you rather go back to being trapped in a mirror, in the dark, for eternity? Because that’s what would happen! And it would happen only after killing the princess and cutting off the pact bloodline, which means Queen Eilwyn would wipe us off the face of the earth!”

“No! I will not! I will not go back!” Venka raged, glass-chiming hiss splintering like glaciers. “It’s not like you ever changed, even after I tried again and again to show you how to do better! And the last ‘charge’? Surely the centuries haven’t addled your knowledge, lawkeeper? The child is human, so it does not matter, anyway!”

“Then I claim her as one of my own, so now it does matter.”

Mu’s breath hitched, and Hattie glanced over to her. She had figured out this was where things would go- she’d seen lots of her cousins bring home strays over the centuries, and call them their children. It couldn’t be that unusual. Not to mention a part of Hattie still held that empty ache where a large, fleetingly human family had been, before she decided to make her own way and search for other dragons. It would be nice to make their little flight a bit larger.

“Sorry, it’s just- I wasn’t expecting-” Softly, Mu huffed out a sardonic laugh. “We talked about a lot of stuff while traveling, and draconic laws don’t apply to actions with humans, so I guess this is his way of finding a loophole.”

Hattie squeezed her hand tighter, and looked at her… friend? Were they friends? She’d only met the human a week ago, so despite the danger-forged trust laced between them, she didn’t really know Mu.

Granted, she didn’t really know her father, either. She’d like to get to know them both as people, if circumstances allowed. “I dunno, I think he sounded like he meant it.” I hope he does. I miss having a big family.

“So be it.” Snatcher drew himself up over the mirror, unknowing of the eyes peering from between branches behind him. “I am doing this as a deliverance of mercy. As an act of duty toward my previous station. But make no mistake- this is also an assurance that you will never touch my children again,” he hissed, inevitable and soft as death.

He brought his wrist to his face, grunting in faint pain as his still-sharp teeth sank into flesh, and then the sulfur-smell of dragonblood seeped into Hattie’s nose as he held his hand above Venka, drops of blood hissing as they stained her reflection red.

Quiet, as Hattie and Mu waited for… something. The roar of Venka’s soul being sucked into the ether out of the mirror, perhaps.

Then, a cloud-sharp gasp from the imprisoned Ice Dragon, as the single hairline crack along her surface grew wider.

Glacier-shrieks of terror grated out from the cracked mirror, a thin blanket of snow filming the ground around it as the Ice Dragon’s soul within struggled to live.

Silence.

In the quiet after the glass-flash screams, Hattie could hear the faint sizzle of salt on the snow- blood, and tears. Her father, unaware of his audience, heaved a sigh, old and sad as dying stars, and Hattie yanked Mu away and ran to the campsite before he caught them eavesdropping on his judgement.

She slammed them both down in front of the dwindling campfire and looked back at her co-conspirator, whose eyes were just as wide as Hattie’s likely were.

Seeing your enemy dead was… good. The stability of knowing those who would see you and your flight dead can no longer strike at you. A victory to call to the skies, a deadly enemy vanquished, like a battle-tale. Hattie should have been relieved. And she was.

It didn’t change the fact that watching her father kill Venka was spooky as hell.

Snatcher faded back into the campsite; a pair of glowing yellow eyes, suspended in the eaves of the night darkness. “I told you not to follow me.”

Mu winced, and Hattie looked down guiltily. Busted. “Sorry, Dad. I just… wanted to be sure.”

The somber shadows under his eyes lightened and the scars around his mouth stretched as his scowl morphed into something more satisfied. “... I get it. You two don’t need to worry about her anymore.” Bonelessly, like lava oozing over basalt, he sat heavily between them, plucking a still-burning coal from the fire and rolling the texture between his fingers absentmindedly. “We need to rest, if you want to get moving early tomorrow. I don’t like how close we are to Subcon, still.”

Hattie leaned forward and poked at one of the campfire embers herself- and then tossed it back with little ceremony when she found out the texture was not the least bit soothing. She preferred the silky slide of ribbon or smooth fabrics, and silently judged her father’s tastes. Soft, plush fabrics, like her blankets back home…

Groaning, Hattie nearly face-planted into the campfire. “We don’t have bedrolls. This is going to suck.”

“Tell me about it,” Mu finally grumbled from where she slouched, glaring into the fire. “I still can’t believe your summer nights get chilly.”

“Well, how fortunate for you that Fire Dragons tend to run warm,” Snatcher said archly, sweeping dirt and dust over the campfire and snuffing it. “You know how early the sun rises this time of year. It’s bedtime for your old man.”

Even if the sun had only barely set, well… her dad did look rather haggard. Hattie scooted closer and wormed her way under Snatcher’s arm, smiling when his startled churr melted into a chest-deep rumble that brought to mind nonexistent memories of napping under one enormous wing, in a warm den dozens of miles and seven centuries ago.

It wasn’t the roughest Hattie slept before. The pine needles were lacking as far as bedding went, but her father made an excellent pillow.

(Mu poked at the campfire cinders, carefully ensuring all the embers were snuffed out, so the glow would not alert anybody of their location.

“Hey, kid,” whispered from behind her. Head propped on a root like it was a pillow, yellow eyes glowing warm as the campfire embers, Snatcher looked up from his supposed rest, one arm carefully still around Hattie as she drooled on his shoulder. “‘S late. And chilly.” He raised up one corner of the cloak they were using as a blanket- a clear invitation.

It almost felt intrusive, with Hattie already on the other side, but… Mu remembered oddly warm book-leather, and bark-scratchy parchment humming in a false purr, and how every night after the Gates of Paracos she slept holding Snatcher’s hard edges like she would a stuffed cat.

Mu slid under the black cloak, dusty-smelling and smoke-warm.

Feet tucked under the makeshift blanket and staring straight at the stars, it felt like threads of fire curled in her breaths. “... Did you mean that, back with- y’know?”

A sleepy “Hmm?”

“About- about claiming me. As one of your own children. Was that true?”

Mu felt Snatcher’s breath hitch, and release in a long, slow exhale. “Only if you want it to be.”

She had no idea where Snatcher and Hattie’s wings would take them, after the Mafia. And she couldn’t leave her home. The salt-brushed beaches, the black lava-stone that still held a crackling whisper of heat, all the scents and sights and smells of home. And the people, like the whaler crew that brought the older teenagers from the convent to their catches to teach them how to butcher and respect such a magnificent animal, like the people in the town proper who hid in their homes like hermit crabs lest they catch the attention of the Cook pirates, like the scholars and pilgrims and mages at Allsaints’.

Like Luka, who had promised he would find her once it was safe on the island.

Throat tight, Mu answered “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I can ask. Sleep warm, kid.”)

Chapter Text

By decree of Her Imperial Majesty Eilwyn Paracos, Queen of Omnoc,

The instated blockade of all ships, products, and peoples into Omnecian waters is lifted, effective as of the third day of the second summer moon. All commerce shall be taxed at a percentage as was before the blockade, and any continuing contraband shall be confiscated as lawful prize, and its crew transported to the closest town’s judicial hall for trial.

The Gates of Paracos shall remain closed to all but Omnecian citizens and merchants registered with a guild.

Copies are to be delivered and displayed at every dock posting and Crown-owned mail-crow station.

--

Mu woke to the red of the rising sun, the dragon-deep breaths of something warm next to her, and Hattie’s foot digging into her thigh from where she’d stretched out over her father.

Shoving the errant appendage away, Mu attempted to squirm her way back into a comfortable position.

Nobody said she had to be the first one up.

(They eventually all groaned into wakefulness, aching and complaining about the hard sleep.

They flew, far and wind-blindingly fast, south, towards the southern Omnecian coast. They landed, and ate Hattie’s kills, and talked about their homes and their stories and the little things, like favorite foods and legends their parents taught them.

They slept in a pile. They woke. They flew again.

Routine was easy, the closer the island approached.)

--

Perhaps a day’s flight out from the coast, Hattie poked at the crude map Snatcher drew in the dirt. “So, what exactly are we going to do about the Cooks? From what you told me they aren’t exactly the straightest arrows in the quiver, but even if they’re dumb, there’s a lot of them.”

“I don’t think numbers will be our main problem,” Snatcher mused, fingers rapping out a pattern on his crossed legs. “From what I was able to observe in the short time I was out there, they don’t exactly seem… organized.”

Mu used the charcoal-tipped stick she claimed from the campfire to poke out a few divots on the circle meant to represent the Pelan isle. “They aren’t. But they kinda took over the entire town’s infrastructure, so even though there’s, what, a couple hundred of them there? They aren’t exactly lined up nice and neat for us to blast into ashes.” She drew out a series of simple lines along the eastern bay. “Which is why I think we should threaten off as many as we can- y’know, big scary dragon, lots of fire, all that theatrical shit. Give them an ultimatum- leave, or die.”

Snatcher snorted, derision puffing out from his lungs as smoke. “You’re giving them an opportunity to leave before driving them out of your territory? Generous, really.”

“Uh, aren’t you forgetting something?” Hattie made a sweeping gesture at the town-dots, motes of dust swirling in her wake. “You said they took over all the infrastructure? How do we get them out of those places?”

Criss-crossing scars stretched as Snatcher’s lips curled into a snarl that had nothing human to it. “Why, by threatening that which they hold most dear, of course. Why did they come to the island in the first place?”

“... They do like their gold. And their stuff in general,” Mu agreed. Searched through old thoughts, and the chaos of the invasion, slivers of memory between the terror and the mourned deaths leading her to what she had seen, perched on the parapet of the convent where even the most sly-footed thief would hesitate to climb. “They took a lot of the looted stuff to the boats…”

Hattie scrubbed her hands together devilishly. “Ooh, they’re made of wood, aren’t they? Now that’s just asking for it.” She then frowned. “But… what if we can’t get all of them out of the streets that way?”

Uhh… “We’ll figure that out when we get there,” Mu said lamely.

Identical arched brows answered her. It dawned on Mu, seeing them side by side, how much Snatcher looked like Hattie- or was it the other way around? If not for the raptor-yellow eyes and face lined with aging stress and scars both, Mu would think she was looking at a grown-up Hattie.

Weird. Probably a dragon thing.

“Somehow I’m not surprised you don’t have a plan, given how this whole thing started,” Snatcher said wryly.

Rude! “It’s- look, we can’t plan for everything, except that I know for a fact that we out-fire them by an eruption’s magnitude. Luka told me that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and considering how every encounter we’ve had has gone so far, I think he’s right.”

“We can always smash any straggler Mafia from the ground,” Hattie pointed out. “It’s awkward, but less destructive than fire- and I doubt any of those goons are packing blood-pact spells.”

“... True.” Snatcher flexed his fingers as if feeling the weight of sword-length claws. “I have a better question, though- Muriel, with the blockade, do you think there will be any ships willing to take us to the island?”

“Probably?” Mu said, and winced, because that was not meant to sound like as much of a question as it was. “For the right price, at least.”

“Always comes down to gold with these guys,” Hattie lamented, ripping up shreds of grass from around their campsite in fidgety agitation. “Please don’t tell me we have to make the flight all the way around to the southern territories if we can’t get a ship at Westport?”

Their thunderous answering silence was enough for her. “Figures,” Hattie grumbled.

Mu couldn’t help but agree. There were a lot of places she’d prefer not to be- Alces, the Glacier Palace, the death-stale air of the Subcon den- but the Gates of Paracos was a place she'd prefer to never step foot near again.

--

Mu stood high on her toes in a futile attempt to see past the river of tall adults swarming the main street, one hand holding Hattie’s to keep her from getting swept off in the crowd, other hand gripping Snatcher’s sleeve as he stiffened every time someone brushed against him- his hissing scowl sending no few passerby and probably would-be pickpockets swerving away in favor of a mark less likely to bite them.

Westport was crowded. And after just traveling with Snatcher, and later with Hattie, for so long, the crush of people and the cacophony of commerce and the stinging brush of fabric over the healing ice-burn on her leg almost felt like too much.

They slithered their way out of the main streets onto the docks, though Mu felt more as if the crowd had spat them out like too-gristly meat. “Ugh, why the hell is it so busy? I know summer is peak trading season, but this is insane.”

“I… don’t actually know,” Hattie frowned. “But if it’s this busy, that means there’s probably enough movement for us to hitch a ride, right?”

By all rights, there should be. Ships from Imperial galleons studded with cannon-doors to rickety old fishing ships laden with the salt-silver stink of the evening’s catch spilled across the teeth of Westport’s docks, each of them hung with the banners of Omnoc’s maritime codes across their prows. Red for ships ferrying cargo and merchants, blue for those accepting pay for passengers, white for official Omnecian business, and black for the more… mercenary kind of commerce.

But, after too many attempts to peel off onto one of the blue-flagged ships only to be turned away due to incompatible destinations, they did find a ship bound for Pelan- middling size, with discolored swathes of wood indicating a number of patch jobs that Mu would bet were not from simply running aground.

It was hung with black, red, and blue.

“Oh, they are totally pirates,” she whispered into Hattie’s ear.

“Yeah, but I’m not too worried. What can they do to dragons?” Hattie shrugged, lackadaisical. “Besides scam us, of course.”

“Ships are flammable, Hattie!” Mu hissed.

“Yeah? So are people,” Hattie grinned back, and okay, she was definitely just messing with Mu.

Mu almost managed to elbow Hattie in the gut before arms hooked around both of them, pulling them close to Snatcher; Mu could feel the faint snarl in his breath as he did so, reminding her of a sea lion scolding her pups. “Ah, yes, just passage for myself and my two well-behaved daughters, to the isle.”

“Not many folks headin’ that direction. Heard the new guys in charge over there are a rough bunch,” the sailor Snatcher was speaking to pointed out. “I ain’t taking responsibility if you get yourselves mugged while we’re docked.”

“I expected nothing less from such stringent merchants as yourself,” Snatcher said, dry as black salt. “I am well aware I am paying for passage, and nothing more.”

“To the point. I like it.” The sailor shrugged, gesturing with the itchy fingers of a greedy man. “We take payment upfront, I’m sure you understand.”

“I do. I trust this will suffice?”

The sailor eyed the pile of coins dropped into his hand, picking one up and running calloused fingers over the edges before whistling. “Damn, where’d you get these? Rob a Saint’s Museum?”

“I did not,” Snatcher said primly. “Just as I’m sure you and your crew stayed put before the Queen’s blockade was lifted.”

And hadn’t that been a relief. Copies of the decree were pinned nearly everywhere any literate sea-merchant could see them, which Mu supposed explained the bustle of Westport as every ship in the west raced to make the most profitable use of the newly-reopened routes.

The sailor barked out a harsh seagull’s laugh, coins vanishing into his pockets faster than Mu could blink. “If you got more where that came from, then we have a deal, Sar. We got some spare hammocks to hang, now get yourselves up before we cast off and leave ya behind!”

As she followed in Snatcher’s cloak-billowing wake with Hattie, Mu scanned the ship, eyes picking apart the swift movements of the sailors crawling over the rigging like spiders, preparing to set sail. Her boots made a hollow clunk over a too-smooth board. Oh yeah, definitely pirates, if they have smuggling compartments.

Mu resigned herself to a short journey marked in equal parts boredom and paranoia, even though she was no longer carrying blood-magic contraband.

At least she had more company this time.

--

As the volcanic arch of the Pelan Isle crested on the horizon, Mu’s heart caught in her throat, and her fingers shook. Home, so close… and so was the Mafia.

“It’s different, seeing it with my eyes,” Snatcher murmured beside her, swaying with the wave-rocked deck with an unnatural balance. “Brighter.”

“Yeah, it’s colorful,” Hattie agreed from his other side. “You said it doesn’t even really snow here? That’s weird.”

“I thought Fire Dragons were all about the warm places.”

“Oh, I wasn’t complaining. Just saying that it’s weird.”

“You can compare notes later,” Snatcher interjected. “In the meantime, point out to me locations of interest. We have work to do very soon.”

As the bay floated closer to them, Mu was more easily able to gesture and whisper about the different places of her home- everything was so unchanged, leaving Mu feeling lopsided as she realized how much she had changed.

Still, Snatcher was right. She gave them the rough outline of the important places in the town- the convent, perched at the first jagged layer of the Falamand Caldera’s rim. The flame-blackened husk of the gaol, which had apparently seen neither use nor repair since Mu fled. The residential districts, the market streets, the smudged border between the fishery and the food stalls, and she could almost smell the fresh fish-bakes that they’d sell back to the fishermen the cooks bought their ingredients from…

Mu shook her head, dispelling that faint heart-tug of home. They were here on a mission. “That over there is the barracks- it’s one of the only places that’s mostly stone, so even though we don’t- didn’t- have much more than a militia, it’s the most defensible place on the island, aside from the convent. Most of the Mafia hang around there.”

“Fish in a barrel…” Snatcher mused, fingernails scraping absentmindedly at the ship’s wooden rails. “That, I presume, is the best place to give the ultimatum?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure at least some will leave, just to save their own hides. If they’re smart.” Which, in all honesty, most of them weren’t.

All three travelers fell silent as activity on the deck picked up, the crew preparing to make land and do… whatever business pirates did with each other. Probably fencing off loot from the town, Mu thought with a pang.

Movements sharp and steeled, Mu flipped over her hood as Snatcher led the way down the ramp onto the docks, where a pack of Mafia and the pirates began to posture at each other and make gruff demands of gold and goods. The Cook goons probably wouldn't bother to remember Mu, but it was better safe than sorry, so she kept to Snatcher’s shadow as they peeled off the docks and vanished into the dirty streets.

Snatcher leaned down to her level as they walked, whispering “Is there a more isolated place? With a better vantage point, perhaps?”

Mu eyed the low, jagged wall of the hibernating volcano that rose at the head of the island, the lower rungs of it carved into narrow layers of terraces, where the summer crops were already starting to ripen. Cama-nuts and yam-vines and blue-white sprays of ash-tuber flowers, all spaced carefully around the heavy roots of fruit trees that made Mu’s mouth water just looking at them from a distance.

“I think I know a good place.”

--

Luka slunk into the main barracks entrance, shoulders carefully hunched and steps timid. He was a regular presence here, now- and one of great entertainment for the Mafia who turned the stone complex into their home base. They found his regular visits over the months to be funny. An opportunity to point and laugh and lead along the lean islander man who came to fruitlessly petition for the Cooks to leave peacefully.

“Oho! Maybe this time, Mafia will listen to little mage man!” The guard lazing at the door cajoled. “May have seen a vision from Saints to leave island!”

Luka kept his head down and didn't respond as the goon chortled at his own jest. They expected little of him besides some brief entertainment at his desperation.

He had them exactly where he wanted.

Sometimes he came bearing ‘bribes’. Mostly barrels of flour; all a poor, overworked Acting High Sage and his pack of scholars could afford to roll into the barracks’ storage rooms while whichever goon declared himself the leader for that day jokingly mused that perhaps, this time, they would consider vacating the island.

Luka knew the goons would never actually use the flour when they could extort and steal from the townspeople. As intended- bread made from blasting powder-laced flour would have been a sin against all good taste.

Luka could not help construct the barriers that had been hidden in strategic places, where the steps up to the convent were surrounded by high-carved walls of the caldera, forming a series of natural bottlenecks. He could not steal into the night and gather the poisons ordered from faceless contacts, nor could he slip into the great hall and drip that same poison into the ale barrels when the time came to make their move.

But this, he could do. Scouting, assessing, force and numbers and catalogued assets, both of the Mafia and of his own associates. He could make a few detours to speak casually to the fellow mages who had slipped down and surreptitiously informed the families in their assigned grid on the war-map in Allsaints’ basement that they would need to take a brief visit to the convent for Saint Fortitude’s day. And to bring their entire family, including the babies, the sick, and the elderly. Everyone needed a little Fortitude in these trying times, after all.

The arched hallway opened up into the air-exposed plaza in the barracks, dirt-pounded courtyard wide enough for larger militia drills. The Mafia lingered in groups, some testing the power of their fists against upright logs, some boisterously grinning and telling tales, and notably a few napping in the shade of the pillars, eyes closed as if there was no Druid-cloaked danger stalking in their midst...

It would be so very easy to slay them. Leashed bloodlust was quickly ground beneath Luka’s heel, despite all that a wolf’s hackles bristled under his sheep-hide charade. One cast of Ruin would take out most of the Mafia here, but more would come, and he would die.

Dying here would do nobody any good. Not himself, not the convent residents who he was responsible for, not the townsfolk, not Muriel, somewhere across the sea and away from here until he could find her and return to a newly-freed island.

A shadow blotted out the courtyard, far too solid and swift to be a cloud.

The shuddering whir of something truly huge moving faster than still air should allow, like the sound of greatsails caught in hurricane winds.

Dozens of Mafia scattered, yelling, from the courtyard like ants, and Luka joined them, huddling beside a stacked-stone pillar before looking up.

The wind from its wings kicked up blinding dust, stinging Luka’s eyes. Angry lava-vents flared red against black scales, the curl of fangs behind snarling lips visible even from its hovering position well out of reach of the humans beneath it. The quills along its upper neck, each longer than the height of two men, flared in a void-corona around eyes like a pair of midnight suns.

I wish I had looked a lot more into Crusader Walker’s treatise on combat against dragons.

A fleeting, hysterical thought, caught in the midst of the panic surrounding Luka like a swarm of hornets, because that was a Saints-accursed dragon hovering right above their heads.

“Mafia of Cooks!” boomed from above- a magma-deep voice that was more felt than heard. “This island is now my territory! Leave, and you may carry on with your insignificant lives! Stay, and you shall have your gold stolen, and your ashes scattered to the wind spirits!”

The following roar shook Luka, body and mind, and he clapped his hands over his ears. “You have until sunrise,” it snarled, gouts of flame blooming like blood in the water from the dragon’s neck-vents in a clear show of intimidation.

Luka was very, very intimidated.

The dragon climbed for the clouds, and Luka stumbled out into the courtyard as the dust settled, squinting at the beast out of legend. As it banked in one last pass over the barracks before retreating to the high caldera peaks, Luka saw something that stopped his mind’s tactical panic in its tracks.

There were two figures on the dragon’s back, almost impossible to see against the creature’s sheer size, if not for their colors against the stark black hide.

Dark purple and sunrise-yellow clung to the front spines. And behind them…

Island-dyed red, with a blond curtain streaming out behind her. No way.

Ignoring the overlapping roar of dozens of Cook voices arguing with each other, Luka bolted for the door.

Damn the dragons, damn the Mafia, and damn him if he was going to stay on the ground if Muriel was up there.

Luka’s eyes rarely left his target- and it was hard to miss the dragon where it roosted, a winged cut of the night sky standing stark against the volcano rim’s stone, some boat-lengths above the terrace gardens.

Luka’s contacts could wait. He had a kid to see. And if the dragon proved to be a problem- well, it would be a problem, but one that Luka would refuse to let kill him.

Eyes fixed on the distant roost, Luka started hiking.

Chapter Text

Hiking up the trails that were usually only worn smooth by the feet of the farmers that tended to the terrace crops, Luka allowed the quiet shush of summer-humid wind wash the rest of the noise from his mind.

He wasn’t exactly stealth-trained, but Luka still kept to the shadows that stood below the magma-stone outcroppings as he approached the wilder territory that the dragon roosted in.

Chancing a peek over one rough granite rise, close enough to hear the dragon’s breaths, Luka confirmed his suspicions.

Sitting back in the midst of casual conversation with another girl her age, lounging beneath the curl of the resting dragon’s neck, Muriel sketched her fingers into a gesture that, knowing her, was probably referencing something exploding.

What the hell did you get up to while I was working here!?

The dragon huffed out a great breath from where its head rested near the children- and Saints, while she was sitting, Muriel’s head didn’t even come up to the beast’s nostrils- and then flared the spines minutely, growling.

“Do not think you can hide from me, human. You reek of salt, and your breath wheezes like that of a dying man.”

Luka grit his teeth and rose, glaring up at the eyes that now arced over the pair of human children. It burned to call up, magic searing old nerve-scars like hot wires under his skin, but despite his locking wrists and shaking fingers, this close up Goetia’s aim would be true.

Death-tasting angles and equations died in Luka’s mind as a streak of red kicked up pebbles and collided into his chest. Smoke-swirls of dark magic vanished as he rocked back a few steps from the force of it, Muriel’s fingers digging into his back as well as the bunched-up fabric of his Druid’s robes.

“You’re still alive,” she sniffed. “I thought- the Mafia are dumb, but I worried-”

I’m still alive? I could ask the same about you! Luka squeezed her back- she seemed fine, sturdy and sure-footed, even if she’d lost weight, and her braids undone and well-loved hair ribbons gone- and narrowed his eyes above blonde hair, teeth showing in what was probably more of a grimace than a snarl; a pale imitation of the dragon he glared at. “You think I’d let the likes of them kill me? Please.”

Muriel pulled back, smiling faintly over her relief, and tugged Luka closer by his mountain-cut sleeves. “Okay, but what are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” Luka managed to sputter, overtaken by the sheer ridiculousness of the question in the face of the hundred and thirty foot dragon that passively watched them. “I got you away from here so I could find you later, and you come back with- with-” He flung one leaf-shaking hand out to the scaled snout that had the audacity to look scrutinizing at the display. “-A dragon? Where did you even find… one…”

His voice died in his throat when the dragon snorted steam, and he remembered it was far, far too close, for all that Muriel disregarded its danger entirely.

Luka sucked in a breath, and possibly an errant mosquito, as that massive head with just-as-massive teeth lowered to his eye level and spoke. “You are her guardian in the Saints’ halls?”

Luka pulled Muriel closer, keeping one arm in front of her so the trailing robe-sleeves hid her from view, even as she protested with a sharp ‘Hey!’. “Yes, I am.”

“I see.” A subtle dip of the dragon’s head. “You have my thanks for what you did, allowing us the means to escape the island. And my thanks for keeping Muriel safe.” One spine-ridged brow arched. “It is a surprisingly difficult task.”

“Hey!” Mu protested.

Us. “... You know what. Why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on, first,” Luka managed faintly.

“Oh, right, I forgot.” Mu waved up the other girl that had been lurking nearby- and Saints, when had she crept so close? “This is my friend Hattie.”

Lambent blue eyes squinted at him as Hattie tilted her head in a way that reminded Luka distinctly of an Omnecian hunting falcon. Apparently he passed her muster, because she cracked a crooked grin and thrust a hand out in greeting. “Hi, I’ve heard a lot about you.” Hattie gripped his forearm in the way that more rural Omnecian rangers preferred, and Luka instinctively returned the gesture.

“All good things!” Mu reassured quickly at Luka’s mild look of alarm. “Anyway, this is Snatcher- he used to be in the convent vault until I busted him out.”

“He- what,” Luka stalled, mind spinning as all the little time-toothed oddities from that last day suddenly fit. The vault door had been opened, and the dragon souls within looted. Muriel had clearly been caught doing something, tossed into the gaol before she burned it down.

Mindless of the dragon that raised its hackles as he grasped Mu’s shoulders and looked her dead in the eyes, Luka demanded “Muriel, what did you do?”

Defensively, she shoved his hands off. “What you wouldn’t do! Everyone was just- lying down and taking it, and I didn’t have enough power to do it on my own, so I had to! All the history says that the pact-spells could cripple armies, and isn’t that an army out there?!” Her outstretched hand flung out to encompass the entirety of the town and the bay, where Cook ships still mingled with the docks.

“A pact-spell? I’m- I leave you alone for a bit, and you make yourself into a Crusader?” Luka pinched the ridge of his nose in a well-practiced stress-relieving motion, sitting on his temper like it was a writhing viper. Calm. Muriel was his ward, and his responsibility, and that was exactly why he hadn’t told her of his activities. “We weren’t doing nothing this entire time! Every day since the invasion, we’ve been undermining them.”

“I’m- what?” Mu gaped at him, and her little she-dragon friend leaned forward in obvious curiosity. “But- why didn’t I see you fighting the Mafia?”

“Because we weren’t, not at first,” Luka said bluntly. “‘All warfare is based on deception’. What do you think would happen to the civilians when fighting breaks out? We were planning on exploiting the service at the convent for Saint Fortitude’s day to get everyone out of the blasting zone before setting everything off.”

“Isn’t Saint Fortitude’s day in two weeks?” Hattie interjected. At Luka’s silent nod, she gulped. “Uh… Dad? Mu? I think we might have messed up a little.”

It was… much to think about. Luka sat heavily on the stone outcropping that used to hide him, sighing into his hands and suddenly far less concerned with the dragon nearby- Snatcher was, apparently, an ally, at least in that he was quite attached to Mu. “Sunrise. Okay. I- we can work with this.”

Folding his hands back down and tucking them into his sleeves, Luka stood, and strode close enough that Snatcher had to bend his head further down to see him. “And what was that about claiming the island as your own territory? I was there in the barracks.”

“Merely a formality, and a bluff,” Snatcher’s smoke-scoff made Luka almost cough from the rough heat. “These Mafia do not seem exactly brave. Or intelligent.”

“If some of them leave, that’s less pressure on us,” Luka agreed. “But it’s not enough to compensate for the accelerated timeline for evacuations.”

Luka considered. The people already in place, the slapdash escape up to Allsaints’ and the sheets of iron-backed wood to brace at the chokepoints, the ships out at sea.

No good field general ever declared a location safe, but he had somewhere that was as close as they could get. First, the two dragons. “You, you, both of you need to take and stay in human shape. I’m taking us down to the convent for an emergency meeting with the rest of the operation.” He rested one gentle hand on Mu’s shoulder, the heat of worried frustration breathing out as calm, bright-edged command. “You, tell me everything you can about what you can do with magic now, and I’ll tell you exactly what we’ve been up to, here.”

(Her eyes were hard, glaring down at the town as Luka outlined the locations of their blast-flour charges and interrogated Hattie and Snatcher on the applications of dragonfire.

She never let go of his sleeve on the stone-steep trek to the convent.)

--

Mu took in the firelit stone room that opened at the foot of the spiraling staircase Luka led them down.

Old books and scrolls piled onto the corner of the table; out of curiosity, she plucked a scroll from the pile and opened it, eyes widening. This was some hefty calculations for siege spells, and where did they even get this? It looked handwritten…

Snatcher lingered like storm-shadow behind Hattie as the other girl made straight for the map pinned down at the center, covered in ink marks and scattered with little wooden docet game pieces representing… something. Probably the Mafia’s favorite haunts, or those blasting charges that were planted, or even the people scattered around town, ready to signal and take the townspeople up the mountain path for a very, very impromptu prayer day to the Saints.

Very impromptu, given that the first person Mu saw tromp down the stairs opened up with “Luka, I swear you better have an explanation as to why my eyes and ears down at the plazas suddenly started sending messages to ask if our High Sage had been tripping mushrooms, because I thought we weren’t bringing up everybody until we had, y’know, a non-suspicious reason to!?”

Almost hidden by the blonde woman’s loud gestures despite being taller than her, a dark-haired man in Valkyrie robes ambled up behind her. “Nah, Amanda, that can’t be right. I’m pretty sure Luka’s incapable of getting high. He’s just gone plain old crazy.”

“Hello to you too, and thank you for the unshaking faith you put in me,” Luka drawled from where he leaned on a chair’s back. “There’s been a change of plans, on account of the dragon that showed up and gave a sunrise ultimatum to the Mafia before razing them to the ground.”

The blonde woman turned to the Valkyrie next to her. “Colin, I thought you were messing with me when you said that.” A more serious, almost pleading look back to Luka. “Please tell me you’re messing with me.”

“Sadly, I’m not. Look, we have a time limit, so even if everyone’s not here we can at least get started.” Luka gestured from Mu to the pair of scholars. “I don’t know if you remember, but Muriel, Amanda and Colin. Amanda and Colin, Muriel.”

“Wait- isn’t that the kid you sent off the island to keep the goons from killing her?” Amanda questioned, and Mu crossed her arms with a huff at being completely ignored. “How’d she get back?”

“... That’s where things get interesting.” Luka grinned like a wolf stalking in the grass. “My guests are Hattie of Nikolaos and the Soul-Snatcher. The dragon that I’m sure half the island has seen by now? He’s right here with us.”

Snatcher tensed, chin tilted high, as the two humans whipped their gazes to him.

“... Looks kinda scrawny to be a dragon,” Colin remarked faintly.

Snatcher snarled, steam hissing from his breath, and all the humans but Mu flinched back as the sound thundered inside the stone room.

“... Never mind,” Colin squeaked out.

Wood scraped against rough stone as Luka pulled out the chair he was leaning on. “Alright, you can gawk at each other later. Right now the rest of our little council will be arriving soon, and we need to get started altering our tactics now.”

--

The sun warmed Mu’s back from where she faced out towards the bay, the glare of it reflecting off the ocean and forcing her to squint to find her targets.

Close enough to speak to, Luka glanced back at the trailing line of people being led up the great mountain trail to the convent as if he could urge them faster with just his eyes.

“Hey,” Mu called out, feeling somewhat unsure about it all. Luka had insisted on setting everything off close to sunset, rather than the next sunrise deadline Snatcher had given the Mafia- he wanted the glare of the sun in the Mafia’s eyes, not theirs. “Are you sure everyone is getting out?”

“I might have had to push my weight around as acting High Sage,” he admitted. “But all the headmen remaining know about this. They’ll make sure.”

He looked back at her, and how she’d begun to fiddle with the ends of her hair- Luka had rebraided them during the meeting with the others in the basement, and it was nice to have it out of her face and to show who she was to people who actually knew what the hairstyles meant. “... You sure you can hit the blast zone? You’ve got the closest ones, so you should be fine, but-”

“I’ll be fine,” she cut him off. She would. Meteor couldn't possibly take any more energy to cast than Valflame, and her aim was good enough. If anything, she was more concerned for him- Luka didn’t have the near-fathomless magical well a Crusader did, so he could maybe get off three siege spells before collapsing. “We only get one shot at this, right? So I’m helping it count.”

Luka opened his mouth to say something… and then closed it, nodding grimly.

A bright flash caught Mu’s eye- mirrorlight, reflected from one of the dozen-odd Sages hidden in the eaves of the caldera rim, high up enough that it would be much more difficult for any goons to get to them, once the siege spells left them depleted and vulnerable.

Luka returned the mirror-signal.

Mu strung together the equations with her eyes fixated on her target- one of the great dining halls that the Mafia had taken to lounging in for their more boisterous evenings. Meteor’s calculation-string was lengthy, and complicated, and it took nearly a full two minutes for Mu to finish casting, and two minutes was a long time in a fight-

The red-tailed streak of Meteor arced away from her like the tephra from a volcanic eruption.

Fire bloomed as it struck the hall, igniting the planted blasting powder and shattering the windows near it.

Mu started gathering herself for another cast, and remembered that two minutes was a very long time, indeed.

A roar echoed in the air, distant and demanding enough to be heard even over the world-splitting screams of nearly a dozen Bolting spells going off at once, reducing just as many buildings- and the people inside- to smoldering ruins. Thank the Saints everyone is out. Houses and things could be replaced- people couldn’t.

Though only a long, winged blot in Mu’s eyes, Snatcher’s distinctive bulk almost seemed to float as he wheeled above the docked Mafia ships, slow wingbeats bringing him to a nearly casual hover above the closest one.

Mu grinned, sharp as the spark before lightning, when a cone of ghost-blue fire reduced the ship to splintered halves. That should get their attention. The threat to their most valued property and the blasting traps laid around the town ought to shove all the goons towards the docks one way or another-

Mu’s view was obscured by her hair whipping across her face, and she impatiently flung it away to look to-

Sweet Saints.

The spell-lines around Luka burned bright enough to force the wind astray, kicking up black Druid’s robes like dragon’s wings.

Luka shifted his weight, one foot circling forward- Mu never realized how much she used her hands when casting before seeing someone who barely moved them- and flung, the displaced air tugging hair and mountain-cut sleeves toward his target.

Thick clouds of lingering smoke from the previous explosions fled the force of Fenrir, Dark Magic comet-shards and ghastly blue fire raining down and reducing the barracks to nothing but a triangle of flat ruin.

Luka had cast in less than a minute.

Whoah. I want to be able to do that someday.

From Mu’s perch on the sharp slope, the town below made for a menacing environment- she was only able to see flashes of impossibly blue fire in the smoke concealing Snatcher as he swooped low and harried any Mafia not already fleeing.

Mu scanned the field, looking for- oh, hell.

She ducked, the feather-razored whir of fletching streaking above where her head had just been. Since when can the Mafia aim? “They’re coming up the path!”

Luka froze mid-spell- his third, would he even be able to stay standing after it?- and scrambled closer for a better look at the ragged line of armed Mafia scrambling up the steps to the convent. Iron-backed wood panels were dropped into place where the stone ridges boxed in the path, but sooner or later the goons would back up and work their way around, or split up and take shots at the siege-casters-

Whistling like a stooping falcon, Hattie cut through the smoke, painting a line of bright fire through the Mafia before banking around for another pass.

Right- she had been in the city streets, hunting for stragglers that may have been hiding out. Not that there could be many- as the wind blew smoke away, Mu caught the tails of nearly all the Mafia’s ships retreating and leaving four wrecks as nothing but splinters of wood, crackling with fire even as they drifted on the blood-dark sea.

Luka shifted away from her, stiff, and Fenrir’s spell-circle sparked faster than any of his previous casts had before; the hair on the back of Mu’s neck rose as the air prickled, and she had the good sense to step away.

The remaining Mafia attempting to climb the mountain were crushed under the gravity of heavy Dark Magic as if by a blacksmith’s hammer. Mu gulped, and tried not to think about how she would never look at a flatcake the same way ever again.

Luka collapsed to his knees with a bone-jarring thump, pained breaths wheezing through grit teeth as Mu rushed to throw his arm over her shoulders. “Oh, Saints, are you okay?” she managed, fingers fluttering with unsureness as she tried to help up a man far taller than her.

“Just a flare-up- I overextended myself,” Luka grunted, gathering his legs below him. “I’ll be fine. You need to worry about-”

Black, jagged storm-shadows. A snap like greatsails straining against hurricane winds.

The earth shook beneath their feet as Snatcher landed before them, neck-vents still trailing smoke and talons gripping onto the sheer sides of the caldera wall.

Hattie, by contrast, barely made a sound as she landed close enough that Luka nearly tripped trying to backpedal out of her way, almost carrying Mu with him.

“... You’re back sooner than I thought,” Luka managed lamely.

“There are no more Cook pirates on the island,” Snatcher rumbled. “Well, no alive ones, anyway.”

Hattie scraped her paw at the loose gravel sheepishly. “The houses and stuff are, um. A bit more wrecked than I thought. Sorry.”

“... It’s okay. Most of Snatcher’s fire was contained to the ships and the water, and I expected the destruction from the blasting powder charges,” Luka said, wincing as Mu helped him sit on the least-uncomfortable looking rock within reach. “Everybody got out. The Mafia left. That’s what matters.” A tired smile. “Even the crotchetiest old general would commend this outcome- hell, most of these people had never fought a real battle before.”

Recognizing that he was drifting, Mu poked him between the ribs gently, ignoring his offended yelp. “We need to get you and everyone else up to the convent for all the post-battle crap, like you said we should.”

“... Yeah, sure, I’ll just walk all the way up there. Easy,” Luka grumbled, though not unkindly. “Muriel, I know my limits, as much as I hate being grounded. I’m down for a while.”

“Who said anything about being grounded?” Mu grinned, something giddy and relieved and pressure-light rising in her chest. “We have two very nice dragons right here!”

Snatcher’s teeth bared in a snarl. “I will not…” His voice died in his throat as Mu craned her neck back to look at him with pleading eyes. “... Fine. But just once. For... transporting an allied commander back to his base of operations.”

Snatcher stretched out a wing, and Mu and Luka half-stumbled, half-climbed across it like a particularly odd gangplank.

Settled behind him on Snatcher’s back, Mu let her glee overtake her face when she heard Luka yelp at the rapid upswing of Snatcher’s takeoff, and then gasp at the sight of the entire Pelan Isle washed gold and red by the setting sun.

The smoke still trailed from destroyed buildings, but that didn’t matter as much as the fact that they’d won.

Chapter Text

To the High Sage of the Pelan Allsaints’ Convent,

It has come to our attention that the relics of the Crusaders’ War that were stolen from your loyally-guarded vault were found in the possession of one of our nobles. Forthcoming, we shall return the relics to your hands, escorted by a Great Lord’s heir, so as to afford the respect owed to the keepers of the dragonsoul vault that is twin to our own, here in the Glacier Palace.

There shall be more relics returned than were stolen. You are to keep them, as they were removed from the Glacier Palace vault. Your successors are to return them upon the Crown Princess Vanessa’s heir’s ascension to the throne.

Should something of the terms be unagreeable to you, we shall request this service of the Nadir vault instead.

Her Imperial Majesty Eilwyn Paracos, Queen of Omnoc

~

To Her Imperial Majesty Eilwyn Paracos, Queen of Omnoc,

I accept. Our docks are open to your Great Lord and their ship to receive the dragon souls. You have my thanks for their return, and the Glacier Palace dragon souls shall remain safe in our keeping.

The remaining souls shall be returned upon the crowning of Princess Vanessa’s heir, as requested from our honorable, if distant, neighbors in neutrality. After the exchange is made, I request that Omnecian naval vessels not cross our sovereign waters. After the blockade, and the unlawful occupation we recently drove out, I’m sure you can understand our wariness towards military forces brushing too close.

Do please heed this request, regardless of what your spies among the merchant vessels report. I assure you, every creature that does not belong on this island has already been driven out or disposed of. Any fleeting worry may be put to rest.

Saint Reason guide your steps,

Acting High Sage

--

In the library halls that now seemed empty after so long hosting half the island’s population in weeks past, Luka found Snatcher, surrounded by stacks of books and leaning casually back in an old chair.

The man- the dragon- looked so… unassuming, compared to the shadow of fire and death that flew above Luka’s head before. Filled out some from regular meals, certainly, but still leaner than a man ought to be. Plain clothes, and an equally plain mop of brown hair that softened the edges of thin scars lashing across Snatcher’s mouth and neck.

Far less plain were the pale gold eyes staring right back at Luka, unnaturally yellow as a cursed owl’s. “Do you need something?” Snatcher asked testily. “Because I already informed you I am not helping with the cleanup- I’m a little busy catching up from spending the past seven centuries in a dark room.”

Luka caught a breath and steeled himself, sitting in the chair across from the dragon. “No, I’m not here about any of that. I’m here to ask about your intentions.”

One dark eyebrow rose. “My intentions?”

“Yes. It is my understanding you had a deal with Muriel, and as grateful as I am for the assistance in removing the Mafia… Why are you still here?”

Snatcher slammed his book closed. Luka didn’t flinch. “If you are so eager to be rid of me, then that’s unfortunate for you, because I am not going anywhere.”

“Oh, you made that fairly obvious,” he shot back. Mu might run between Snatcher’s talons without a care in the world, but Luka was far less trusting, not when he was unaware of the dragon’s intent. “I just want to know why.”

Snatcher slowly placed the book back on the table, and leaned his chair back with a distinctly predatory smirk cutting across his face. “Did you know that Falamand is still very, very active, down below?”

Luka frowned. He… didn’t see the connection. “Well, yes. Falamand erupts on an eight-century cycle; we know how close the magma is. We don’t have to worry about it for another three hundred years, though.”

Snatcher’s grin fell, looking more like a pout than anything. Had he been trying to scare Luka? “Ah, I suppose so. But, yes, the volcano is active, and the magma is not too far down. It is a comfortable environment for Fire Dragons to dwell.”

“There are plenty of other volcanic islands nearby. Ones without people, with more frequent eruptions,” Luka pointed out. Why are you still here? What has such a tie to you, and is it something that invites a threat to my people? “So I’ll ask again. Why stay here, in a half-wrecked island town with humans everywhere?”

“... It is Muriel.”

“Muriel? But she fulfilled her bargain. Don’t tell me you’re adding more-”

“Never,” Snatcher hissed like the scream of boiling water- steam included. “Muriel owes me nothing, and never will.” The snap-smoke smell of a lit match faded as the dragon’s temper eased. “With Muriel... Tell me, did you ever have children?”

Singed fingers and messy handwriting and the heart-swelling pride of watching the children he settled down from nightmares cast perfect spells bright enough to chase away the worries. “... In a way, yes.”

“Then you understand.” Snatcher’s eyes slanted to the library window, where it overlooked the practice grounds Luka knew Mu was using. “It isn’t proper to adopt a drachling into your flight without your own territory to hold. This is her home- and it is, admittedly, the safest option for I and Halcyone to take, given the great distance between us and Omnoc.”

Ignoring Luka’s minutely thunderstruck silence, Snatcher’s smirk flashed the edge of sharp teeth. “The queen might not consider vengeance worth the cost of a full campaign to a dragon-held island, but I do not trust the princess the same way, after what we did to her- even if she deserved far worse.”

Like being splashed with water in deadly winter, Luka’s thoughts froze for a soul-hitching moment of sheer terror. “Vanessa?”

“Hm? Yes, that’s her. Made quite the obstacle of herself. Vile woman. Flammable- hurk.”

“Where did you meet her? How? What did she do?” The front of Snatcher’s cloak and tunic shook in the weak but desperate grip Luka had knotted into it.

One hand rose, slow as a stalking lynx, to rest on Luka’s fist. Plucked his curled fingers away from the fabric, and held on to the trembling High Sage by the scarred wrist.

Shoved, hard, forcing Luka back into his seat and tipping the front two chair-legs up before they slammed back down with a jarring scrape. “Do not touch me like that again, or you will not have a hand to touch with at all.”

“I- I’m sorry. That was unbecoming of me.” Luka let out a shuddering breath. Was it proof that his Saints-blessed instincts had become so bent that he felt less threatened by the dragon who threatened to tear off his limb than by a human woman an ocean away? “I just- tell me what happened with Vanessa. Please.”

“Vanessa was the one paying the Mafia to break into the vault for dragon souls, because she was working with an Ice Dragon taken from her own vault. We encountered her when Muriel was carrying me.” Snatcher recited, laced with irritation. Shrugged, miffed, and tugged the wrinkles from the front of his tunic where Luka had grabbed him. “We fought, and she lost, and we flew away.”

“That’s it? Nothing else, no details-”

“Pardon me if I’m not exactly in the mood to trade battle-tales with a human who manhandled me,” Snatcher sneered. “You’ll live without knowing what happened to your precious princess.”

It’s not the princess I’m worried about. Luka jerked to his feet, chair scraping aggressively behind him. “Thank you, Snatcher. You’ve been very forthcoming.”

Luka left the library feeling hazy and tight-breathed, peeling around corners and passerby keeling out of his way as if in the wake of a dark-robed storm.

Mu looked fine when Luka saw her with Snatcher and Hattie on the caldera slope, looked fine after the battle and every day after that Luka saw her, But Vanessa scared him so much more now than she did when he was still with her, even five years after; he knew, now, what lurked in her heart, how bad it had truly been back with her, and he had more to worry about than if it was just himself in her snare.

Mu had seemed fine, but Luka had to be sure. She’d been close enough to Vanessa to fight her.

Luka’s hair fluttered back in the hot summer wind as he blew into the casting grounds, eyes roving until he spotted Mu lounging on a bench, scribbling equations and experimenting with functions on a piece of scrap paper.

She looked up before he reached her, brows drawn at his flustered appearance as he hovered like a chicken over her brood. “Uh… is everything alright?”

“I- yes. Just checking to make sure you were alright,” Luka said lamely.

“Is… there a reason I wouldn’t be?” Her voice rose in the uniquely sarcastic way teenagers always seemed to do.

Luka sighed softly, folding down to sit beside her. She respected the truth, and straightforwardness. “I heard you fought the Omnecian princess.”

Mu’s eyes went hard, with a brittle undertone, like deceptively fragile ice over a lake. “Yeah, I did. So?”

“I just… needed to check on you, after that. It worried me.” Luka leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees and trying not to think about how awkward his explanation was.

”That was weeks ago, and I got away light, so why is this such a big deal now?” Mu snorted, scrap-scribblings forgotten.

Got away light!? ”Because I know what she can do! Nobody ever comes out from her unscathed.” Luka grit his teeth, biting back his raised tone, as minute as it was.

“Okay, so maybe I didn’t come out unscathed, but it could have been a lot worse, I’m fine.”

“Didn’t come out- What did she do to you?”

Twisted to face her, hands on her shoulders- gentle, for all that the poisonous worry clouded his heart.

“Just a little ice burn on my leg- I’ve gotten worse burns practicing with Fire.” Mu brushed off his hands- but kept one held in her own. Luka let her, remembering one particularly precocious preteen who decided that asking for hugs was too childish, but still managed to find other ways to get them. “Stop fussing. Like I said, it could have been a lot worse.”

Maybe someone else would have missed it. But the way Mu held herself, rigid and stubborn as a granite wall, and the carefully even breaths that stuttered, ever so slightly…

She didn’t have to ask, just like back when she was younger. Luka straightened around, and draped an arm around Mu, the trailing sleeve tucking Mu close like a crow’s wing. “You don’t have to tell me. But… I just want you to know that you will be safe here, no matter what happened.”

Heavy, long silence, followed by a wet sniff. “She- she was going to take Snatcher’s soul a-and put it in my body, because she wanted to- to-” A shuddering breath, teeth grit against trickling tears. “She wanted to kill us like that, slowly, or- or something worse-”

Luka froze, and stopped breathing. First in fear- fear of Vanessa, and fear for Mu. And second in a sheer, steam-hiss of fury; the almost fanciful thought of going back to Vanessa bloomed in his mind, so he could be there to slit her throat with a naked blade.

“And- and it’s so stupid, because nothing actually happened, we beat her, and we got away,” Mu went on, stuffed-down fear rising like pillowed lava. “But it’s just- if we were any slower, or any closer to her, or Hattie was hit head-on- or-”

Luka pulled Mu closer, until she was little more than a curtain of blonde hidden from all the world’s threats behind black robe-sleeves. Her arms squeezed him like he would vanish from beside her, her wet face dampening his tunic.

Heart aching, Luka pressed his lips to her hair, like he hadn’t since she was eleven and lurking outside his perpetually-lit office because of a nightmare. “Nobody ever knows the future, not truly,” he started, slowly, as bared his teeth in a snarl even dragons would never scoff at. “But I can promise this- if she ever steps foot near this place and near you, it will be the last thing she does.”

They stayed there, silent and still, until Mu sniffed and leaned out of the hug. “She hurt you too, huh?” she asked, darkly sardonic.

“I- no, she…” Luka began to deny on instinct, before he sighed, and regathered his words. If Mu caught the meanings behind his fretting words, she definitely would catch him lying. And a lie wasn’t what she needed to hear, right now. “Yeah, she did. But she exiled me, and I ended up here, so I don’t think it turned out so bad, in the end.”

Mu choked on her own gasp, head and hands moving to roll back the sleeve of the arm still draped around her shoulder, revealing stiff, age-paled scars. “Wait a- Your name, banished by the- you’re the fiance!?” Mu’s disbelieving eyes met his shocked ones.

“I-” Luka stuttered, and could not finish.

“Oh sweet Saints, it is true.” Mu leaned her head back to rest it along the stone wall, neck still supported by Luka’s arm. “Oh, hell, you’re an Omnecian Great Lord. That’s- Hattie and I talked- That’s a big deal, isn’t it?”

Luka winced. He… had never expected to tell anyone, let alone expected anyone to figure it out. “... They’re still gossiping about that, huh?” he managed weakly.

“Um, yeah, they are. Most people think you’re dead though?” Mu phrased it as a question, or perhaps a reassurance. And then went rigid, straightening from her previously relaxed posture as if shocked. “... But Vanessa, what she wanted when we fought- she thinks you’re still alive.”

Luka felt cold, as if doused in winter sea-spray. “... It’s good, then, that nobody else knows who I am.” He grinned weakly, trying for reassuring but probably landing more on a grimace. “Besides, Luka Pryce, with all his allegiances to his family’s lands and inheritance and blood-ties, is dead. She can’t search for what’s not there.”

Repeating it aloud warmed him against that frigid worry, even as Mu leaned further into him as if seeking shelter from a blizzard. Luka Pryce was dead. In his place was High Sage Luka, of no family name, who guided the next generations of young mages and was so moon-brightly proud of every apprentice he’d taught. He squeezed Mu’s shoulders at that, and felt her steady beneath him.

They would be okay.

--

Luka crept through the halls as if he were a common bandit instead of the High Sage. It was more habit that guided his steps through the night-quiet halls, years of insomniac nights and equally sleepless troubled students bringing him to Mu’s door.

Many of his kids had rough days in the past. Mourning the loss of family, or storm-dreams of drowning after the hurricane whose very wake he sailed in behind. Muriel’s days… were going to be rougher, he knew.

Moving quietly, Luka slid open the door to Mu’s room, where she had gratefully scattered her things and made a mess with her various knick-knacks and deliberately made it feel like hers again.

Haunting blue glowed in the darkness. “Who...?”

Hattie’s voice. Soft and quiet, accented even thicker than Luka’s own. “Oh, Luka,” Hattie went on, relaxing from her tense stance where she sat up next to Mu, who snored softly into her pillow. “What are you doing here?”

“... It was a bit of a hard day for her. I’m just checking in.”

“I… don’t know exactly why, but yeah, me too.” Hattie’s eyes tilted in an odd head-bob that vividly reminded Luka of the venomous lizards that hid between the cliff-cracks. “I just wanted to hang out some, and I ended up staying past sunset, so… I’m sleeping here.” She shrugged.

“That’s… that’s good,” Luka said, settling himself on the chair pulled close from the messy desk. And then stilled, remembering his encounter during this past day. “Ah.. does your father know you’re sleeping here?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, he knows.” Hattie shifted, nudging her knees out from under the covers to prop them up and rest her chin on them. “He’s back at the lava tubes- I’m pretty sure he’s almost found a safe tunnel down into the closest magma chamber to sleep in.”

Sleeping in Falamand’s magma. Saints alive. “So long as nothing is set on fire that’s not supposed to be on fire, you are welcome in these halls, any time. You and your father.”

“Just like that?” Hattie asked, incredulous.

“Just like that. All public places are free to anyone residing here, and given how often you’re up here with Muriel, I think you count as a resident.” When Hattie buried her face into her knees with an embarrassed groan, Luka ruffled her hair sympathetically, and tried not to think about how much like a cat she was as she pushed her head further into his hand. “I’m just glad she has such a good friend.”

Hattie shrugged off his hand, but didn’t look up. “It’s- just kinda lonely. Dad doesn’t get it- he likes being around Mu, sure, she’s part of our flight so that makes sense, but I like being around lots of people doing, y’know-” She gestured vaguely. “People-things.”

Luka hummed in thought. “You know… I know you cannot cast, but even just learning the theory and the mathematics behind magic can be beneficial for maturing sixteen year old minds.”

“I’m six-hundred fifty, actually,” Hattie corrected, as if he had missed the mark by a year or two instead of the span of centuries.

“... Ah,” Luka managed, shelving that knowledge to turn over in his mind later. “Still, the point still stands. You’re more than welcome in my classes.”

“I might take you up on that offer, actually.” Hattie’s small grin was sharp as the moonlight seeping through the window-slats, looking more like a sleepy teenager than a centuries-old dragon.

“If you do, I recommend you sleep soon. I imagine even dragons need their rest,” Luka advised, standing and wincing as he stretched out his hands.

“I’ll try. But is this place always so active at night? The footsteps can be kinda loud, and there’s always someone in the library, and I swear I heard someone bang around in the kitchens one time.”

“Let me tell you a secret.” Luka leaned down and hid his whispers with a hand curled around one side of his mouth. “Go find Amanda. She makes these plugs out of sea-sponge and cloth- stick them in your ears and you won’t hear a thing at night.” Smiling softly, Luka made for the door.

Stopped, and turned around to look back at blue eyes like a ghost-glow in the darkness. “... Was it you who convinced Colin there was a glowing-eyed spirit haunting the kitchens?”

Hattie looked away, fiddling with the frayed edges of the bedding, but failed to hide her grin. “Maybe, but you didn’t hear it from me. And if you did hear it from me it was totally an accident, and I just wanted a snack.”

Luka kept his amused snort quiet enough to avoid waking Mu, but it was a near thing.

--

Apolonia Pryce boarded the waiting Imperial galleon, white-bannered and well-guarded by Omnecian marines and a particular mercenary she had hired from all the way out of the Metro Port.

“Sar Cato Larsen,” she greeted, offering her hand for a formal arm-clasp.

“Lady Apolonia Pryce.” Cato took it. And then pulled Apolonia down into a dip and caught her grinning lips on their own.

The experienced marines on deck politely looked away. The more experienced marines hooted and hollered and wolf-whistled without shame.

Apolonia allowed herself to be pulled back up, hugging her partner fiercely enough to hear the breath wheeze from their lungs despite the boiled leather armor.

Playfully, she pushed them away, and turned to address the marines. “Is the cargo secured?”

It was Cato who answered, instead. “Yes, everything is already secured. It’s you who was late.”

“Only by a little,” Apolonia protested, eyes rolling. “It’s not like I don’t have a good reason to be late, I had to catch up with some contacts at the palace.”

“Oh, still had some business to wrap up?” Cato waited until the sailors and soldiers had dispersed to prepare for launch before they leaned surreptitiously over to whisper in Apolonia’s ear. “I assume it’s business that you would prefer to discuss by the prow?”

Where nobody can hear us over the clatter and waves, and where nobody will think we’re hiding anything, they meant. “Hm, that would be wise, yes.”

Three years in the teeth of the Pryce’s naval campaign against the Metro left Apolonia with far steadier sea-legs than most, her stance perfectly balanced without the need of the railing at the ship’s prow. She was under no illusions that those three years were anything but her family’s attempt to keep her out of trouble after Luka had died, and she’d gone on a steel-bristling tear across the country to Alces.

Of course, Apolonia had stayed on her tear over the past five years, just… in a different way. Awkward connections with her men turned into military contacts turned into inter-house spies, as marines on the Metro seafront took leave and returned to their homes, with the request from their commander to keep her in mind for any… gossip, she called it.

It meant that in the past year, after her own return from the fighting, Apolonia had free reign of the Glacier Court to mingle with the High Council, as expected of a Great Lord’s heir. For a year she had prayed more often to Saint Vendetta than any other paragon, and swore to tear out every contract, every promise of allyship Vanessa had, and leave the princess bleeding for it.

And, well, Apolonia’s last few weeks at the palace before being dispatched like a common armed escort had been… interesting.

“You know what we’re carrying, right?” she said casually, leaning out on the rails and seemingly only enjoying the salt sea-wind next to her partner.

“Oh, certainly. I mean, I’m not supposed to, but you know how that works.”

Apolonia scoffed. “I don’t even know why anyone would bother keeping information hidden from you, with how you sniff it out. The Pryce spymaster would have been baying to employ you to our house.” With a pang, Apolonia remembered who that position was supposed to belong to. Luka had been a passable commander, skilled with magic and tactics, but his apt mind and calm, sly wit would have made him the ideal spymaster, once she took her seat as one of Omnoc’s Great Lords. “But it’s not a coincidence that we’re taking back more dragon souls than were stolen from Pelan.”

“Do tell.”

“Our dearest little royal menace got herself into some pretty deep dragon-shit.” Apolonia leaned to Cato, conspiratorial. “Apparently she was the one smuggling all the dragon souls into the palace.”

“No way, who would be so stupid as to mess with them? What the hell would she even get out of it?”

“Saints burn it, I have no idea why, I just know that Vanessa was way more erratic than usual, and all this dragon soul nonsense blew up in her face. Literally.” Apolonia waved at her own face and arms. “It’s not as bad as it could have been, but nobody can hide burns on their face.”

“You are going to tell me where she got those burns, then, my dear?” Cato leaned in, poking Apolonia in the shoulder.

She pushed their finger away. “Yes, you nosy bastard. Apparently messing with dragon souls got out of hand, because I finally managed to get that cleric that was with Vanessa’s entourage to sing like a bird for the right treats, and, well…” She trailed off. The other parts, the smuggling and the pointed words like silk over steel and stripping away the princess’s support pillar by pillar, that was expected for Apolonia’s path to full vendetta. But this… “There was a dragon. A live one.”

Cato looked at her, dark eyes searching, before their playful expression fell. “... You’re not joking, are you?”

“I wish I wasn’t.” She blew away a stray strand of hair, already going frizzy from the damp sea air. “We have no idea where it went, but I think Queen Eilwyn pushed the dragon down in favor of other concerns. Because I heard a few of the High Council seats whispering about bringing up Vanessa’s legitimacy as an heir, after the dragon-freeing and smuggling stunt. And Her Majesty might even be considering adopting a Paracos cousin into the line of inheritance so that Vanessa doesn’t take the throne.”

Cato whistled. “Wow, so they are serious about that, if they have the queen seriously thinking about shuffling the line of succession.”

“Personally, I hope this milk run doesn’t take too long so I can get back to the palace and start seriously pushing to unseat Vanessa as Crown Heir.” Apolonia shrugged. “The dragon is probably long gone from the continent anyway, so I don’t feel the need to be concerned about it.” A thoughtful pause. “Also, if she’s not the heir anymore, it will be way easier to kill Vanessa without being caught, once I’ve stripped her of her last supporters.”

“Something tells me Queen Eilwyn doesn’t want her news of her heir stealing from the other vaults and releasing a dragon to go public.” Cato’s glance slid sideways, sly and sharp. “So of course, I’ll spread the word to everyone who will listen. You know how fast news spreads among guilded mercenaries.”

“Aw, that’s sweet of you to offer,” Apolonia teased. “Hell, I might not even need to lay the groundwork for the rest of the nobility to gossip- something this big, they’d figure out soon on their own.”

She would lay the groundwork, though. Assassination was out of the question, logistically, but Apolonia didn’t even care much for Vanessa’s death. Simply cared to ruin her, shred every connection, legal or emotional, the princess made.

Vanessa killed Apolonia’s little brother. So she would suffer, isolated and cold as a blizzard’s heart, surrounded by people and yet utterly alone.

--

Impatient, Apolonia stoically refused to fidget, despite the heat. Summer in the tropics, even just in greaves and gauntlets and a red cloak embroidered in the poison-gold thorns of her house, was enough to make anyone sweat just by standing, even in the high-arched entrance hall of the Pelan Allsaints’ convent.

The suspiciously empty entrance hall, bare of anyone but Apolonia, a pair of marines standing by the trunk with the dragon souls, Cato guarding their backs by the doorway while giving a red-garbed teenager an odd look, and a few scholar-students whose curiosity outweighed their bravery.

“The High Sage will be down soon, he was simply resting”, a Valkyrie had told her, leaning casually against the wall and daring her to protest. Apolonia rolled her eyes. Resting, it wasn’t even past midday yet.

One of the students, blonde-haired and dressed in red, apparently caught Apolonia’s eye-roll, and managed to spit the quietest raspberry imaginable in her direction.

Apolonia glanced subtly about, tracing every person’s line of sight to determine if they witnessed such a childish display at a visiting noble.

She then stuck out her tongue to accompany the rude gesture aimed at the student.

Said student was hiding her snorting giggles when the High Sage swept into the hall, flipping through a stack of letters and muttering to himself as he blindly jogged up to Apolonia and her party. “Ah, my apologies, I just had to open the vault, and there was-”

He looked up, and his voice died.

Apolonia’s heartbeat drummed in her ears, because- because he looked older, certainly. More worn, nipped by the southern sun and hair shorter than she remembered, but-

Unbidden, Apolonia strode across the hall and wordlessly crushed her brother into a hug.

Paper crumbled and crackled, forgotten, as shaking hands wrapped around her in turn and she knew this was real. Overwhelmed, she squeezed, just to be sure.

“Ack- Nia, ribs, breathing!” Luka sputtered, but didn’t let go.

She eased her grip, and stepped back, and noticed his eyes were wet- hell, hers were too. “I- we all thought you were dead, how…?”

Before he could manage a reply, a voice called from behind him. “Who is that?”

Craning her head to look over Luka’s shoulder, Apolonia spotted the blonde student, arms crossed, looking at her with clear suspicion in her eyes.

“I’ll tell you later, Muriel,” Luka said softly, gesturing subtly to their audience.

Suddenly aware of the weight of the convent residents and her tiny entourage’s eyes, Apolonia snapped to attention, draping command over herself like a fine veil. “Cato, please ensure the cargo is secured in the vault.”

As the marines hefted the chest between them and marched down the hall, Cato stooped to whisper in her ear. “Who is-?”

“My brother,” she murmured back. “Later.”

Cato nodded silently, easy trust passing between them like breathing, and followed the pair of soldiers down the hall, one hand resting on their sword.

“Colin, go with them,” Luka said, and the Valkyrie lazily lounging at the wall peeled off and followed the Omnecians.

“...We can’t talk here,” Luka admitted, looking as if he wanted to either huddle into his Druid’s robes or hug her again. “But I know a place.”

--

Luka sat heavily on the ground of the high balcony, legs dangling through the wide gaps in the rails; even though his robes bunched awkwardly, the partially weightless feeling of suspending his legs over open air calmed him. As did the view, the sunset behind them spilling red as a thousand forest fires.

As did the drink he brought with him- Colin’s brew, which wasn't the best-tasting but was, most importantly, strong.

Surreptitiously, he scooted the second cup over to Apolonia, who mirrored his seating with her armored legs dangling from the balcony. “Can’t blame you for stopping for a drink, after all that- Saints above, it’s a miracle you even survived,” she muttered, taking a sip before making a face, and then proceeding to drink from her cup again. “It’s just… Why didn’t you ever tell us? Or even just me, you know I wouldn’t tell anyone if you asked me not to.”

“I know you wouldn’t. But I worried about what else you would do.”

“... I’m still not sure I get it,” Apolonia admitted, sounding as if it pained her. “I could get the banishment lifted, one way or another- my allies and their allies are more than enough to push for it.” Hope in her voice, like the setting sun behind them. “You could come home.”

Grave-silent, Luka looked at the mountains touching the sky, lifted by the fire in their hearts over countless millennia. Resilience, and growth. “I won’t. I have responsibilities as the High Sage, and people who I love, and- Nia, I’m happier here than I ever was in Omnoc.” He waved directly at her, and she stared openly at how his fingers couldn't quite form into a pointing gesture, how his sleeves rolled back to show poorly-healed scars. “And I know good and well the queen would never allow her authority to be undermined like that, going back on her word. It would end in a fight.”

He… admittedly left out that Vanessa had been looking for him, the thought prickling glacier-hot fear down his spine. Vanessa, unlike Eilwyn, would likely lift his banishment.

And then she would imprison him once again; unlike his time as a student at Zenith, wintering with his fiance in her family’s Alces manor, Luka would be chained by more than only fear and love and the craving for affectionate touch.

“It has been a while since you’ve been to the capitol, so…” Apolonia muttered, eyes pinning him. “If you’re worried about a house war, you shouldn’t be, because we would win.” She sketched lines of owed-and-owed-to in the air, likely visualising the odd knot of connection she had tied around and yet away from Vanessa. “House Paracos’s military ties are weakened, ours and our allies’ are strong, and the princess’s position is weak and brittle- she’s heirless, and she gave up on a new marriage contract after all her courting go-betweens were blocked.” By me, went unsaid, but Luka knew it anyway.

And Apolonia was right. She had destabilized Vanessa’s political standing to a truly significant degree, so that what should have been a young Crown Heir cutting her teeth on the spider-silk weave of the Glacier Court and High Council was instead blood in the water, fangs sinking deep into her royal reputation.

And Luka didn’t care about any of that victory. “I know we could win. Hell, maybe even overthrow the Paracos line with enough support from the other Great Lords!” He leaned his head against the rail-top, sunset-cool stone grounding him in the present rather than visions of the wars he was trained for but never wanted to wage. “Trust me, I would like nothing more than to see Vanessa dead for what she did to my kids. But the life-cost of such a war would be far more than I’m worth. People’s lives aren’t worth such comparatively petty grievances!” His voice and head rose with every word, clawed fingers drawing lines of frustration in the air between them.

Taken aback by his impassioned denial, she looked from his wide gestures to his unwavering glare, so different from his stiff, cowed uncertainty of five years prior, and muttered “You have changed.” Apolonia tentatively reached out, resting a warm hand on his shoulder. “You… Are you sure, though? Even if you have duties here, and don’t want blood shed in your name… Not even to visit?”

Luka’s heart ached, because he had missed his sister, the armored sun to his spy-shadow, even as he renounced his inheritance in a quiet room with a half-melted vigil candle. “I’m sure, Nia. Vanessa- she- I can’t ever go back.” He shivered in the warm wind, memory crawling through his veins like ice and lava and the sting of viper-venom, all at once.

“I want Vanessa stripped of all allies and of all trust,” Apolonia said slowly. “I want her broken and bleeding at my feet for what she did to you.” She sighed heavily. “But I won’t kill her, not yet, if you feel so strongly about it. It’s vendetta for you, after all.”

“Thank you. Truly.”

“This doesn’t come without a cost, though.” Apolonia waggled a chiding finger at him, as if he were a preteen following his big sister around Pryce Manor rather than a man of twenty-five. “You’re going to have to let me visit! And I’ll need to let someone in on all this, of course.”

“Wh- please don’t, surely you-”

“Aw, don’t get your skirts all twisted. Cato is my fiance, and they’ve been in on all this from the start, of course I trust them!”

“Cato- your what? You’re getting married!?”

“Right? I thought Mother would never get off my back about that! Speaking of that, though, you mentioned your ‘kids’, are you telling me you had children while you were away?”

“Well, um, in a way. Not biologically, at least…”

--

Mu skipped back and nearly tripped over the half-empty chest, making a face as Cato’s thunderous sneeze nearly sprayed her. “Hey, watch it!”

Cato sniffled and rubbed the bridge of their nose blearily. “Ugh, either I’m allergic to you, or someone is plotting.” Their eyes narrowed. “Given Apolonia is involved, I’m inclined to believe the latter.”

“Somehow, that doesn’t reassure me,” Mu retorted. “What are you doing here anyway, Sar Cato? Last time we saw each other you said you would be in the Metro for a good while.”

Seeing a familiar face had been a jolt of surprise, to be sure. Mu had followed them into the vault, and nearly snapped at the marine that tried to shoo her off like a stray kitten before Cato had dismissed them. And then said that as long as Mu would be getting underfoot, she may as well help by putting up the dragon souls on the vault-shelves.

“Mm, I was, but not anymore. My fiance asked that I accompany her on this escort mission, and who am I to say no to that?”

Contemplatively, Mu rotated an old goblet in her hands, wondering how the dragon within it would communicate- if it could at all. Shivering, she placed it on the shelf and yanked her curious fingers away, as if it burned. “... Is it true that she’s Luka’s sister?” Mu asked, reaching again to stroke sunbeam-light fingers across the goblet’s rim. Five years across an ocean, seven hundred years in a dark room… She wondered if Snatcher knew the dragon in this cup. If it was a Fire Dragon, like him, or possibly even part of his flight before he died the first time.

Narrowed eyes, gray and flint-keen, scrutinized her. “And what makes you think that?”

“I already knew Luka was a Great Lord’s son, and the family resemblance is pretty strong.” A brief pause. “Also, I heard what she said to you.”

“... Huh. Sharp ears on you, missy,” Cato finally said, incredulous.

“You just aren’t as subtle as you think,” Mu shot back on instinct.

“That’s real rich coming from you, Little Miss ‘Started an inter-guard fight at the Gates and clogged up border commerce for a full week while they sorted out that administrative nightmare’.”

Mu wilted. “... So you heard about that, huh?”

“Oh you bet I did. Should have seen the earful Grooves tried to give me over letters since I was the one who sponsored you. I don’t think he’s going to talk to me for a while.”

Mu shoved away the oily film of guilt that still floated over her despite their light tone. “Yeah, well I got stabbed trying to get through the Gates because those two assholes kept trying to undermine each other, so I really don’t care how they feel.”

“Hm, yeah.” Cato froze, the fancy inkpot they were holding nearly dropping. “Wait, they what?”

(Later, with Snatcher and Hattie not far behind her, Mu elbowed and bullied her way to the front of the docks, where the High Sage was just finishing his farewells to the Omnecian delegation with far less formality than usually expected.

His sister slapped him on the back cheerfully, and then doubled over with a breathy ‘Oof!’ after Luka elbowed her in the gut as revenge.

Mu froze as Apolonia’s eyes landed on her, dark eyes sparking with the kind of dangerous mischief Mu associated with the kind of people who played with knives for fun. “Hey, little lady, I didn’t see you there.” She leaned down, whispering in the least subtle voice Mu had ever heard. “Make sure your dad remembers to write me, yeah? You know how he gets with his head stuck in his scrolls.”

Groaning, Luka pinched the bridge of his nose. “Nia, please…”

Mu looked at Luka, who was valiantly keeping the obvious embarrassment. Glanced at Snatcher, who lingered close- she knew he was here to make sure the Omnecians actually left, justifiably wary of them. Returned to Apolonia’s cats-grin, as if Mu was a particularly entertaining mouse she was stalking.

“I don’t know, which dad?” Mu said with perfect seriousness.

Luka choked on his own air. Apolonia just looked confused, even as Cato snickered at her.

Snatcher only looked dumbfounded, the smallest of genuine smiles pulling at his lips.)

—

(Sitting at the tide-pools and kicking her feet in the water while teaching Hattie what pool-critters were edible, and which were poisonous, and which bit with venom laced in their spines, Mu turned toward Snatcher’s questioning churr.

He pulled them both to sit beside him and lean against the salt-pitted boulders, and he drew the tale of Anankos the Forgotten through the constellations, visible here but not in the northerneastern Omnecian reaches.

He ended his story with a question. And Mu was pretty sure it wasn’t a rhetorical one.

“Wait, are you asking to adopt me?”

Hattie rolled her eyes. “Saint Truth above, yes, duh.”

Mu thought for a while. Leaned into him, gently elbowing him in ribs that were finally starting to fill out. “Is that it? I thought I made myself pretty clear when I was getting back at the Omnecian Lady at the docks. Of course.”

One arm around Mu. The other around Hattie, crushing them both into a sand-dusted hug.

Bark-scratchy purrs rumbling in her ears, Mu kept the feeling of family close as she and Hattie were simply held.)

--

Snatcher stood before the yawningly dark entrance to Allsaints’ vault, taking a shallow, open-mouthed breath to discern any scent of danger.

Seven hundred years, with only his own memories and blood-ink and gradually-yellowing pages to contain the breadth of his mind between long periods of torpor.

“... You sure you want to do this?” Luka asked beside him, leaning on the Unlock staff used to unseal the vault.

“Yes, I am sure..” At least for now.

Snatcher stepped inside before he could think otherwise and turn tail to flee, examining the shelves by the light of Luka’s Fire spell. “I just intend to talk, for now. Some of their bodies may be too wrecked to inhabit again, or even if they can return to their bodies, they may wish for true release- if they do, I can give that to them.” It would not be a task he would enjoy. But… he understood why they may wish to, the same way he understood why the humans’ Saint Mercy was often depicted holding a slim knife. “As for the others… I just wish to know where they stand.”

“... You really are serious about this, aren’t you? Seeing if humans and dragons can coexist again?”

Snatcher reached for the first item he saw- a moon-faced mask, scented faintly of sea-deep depths that no human could reach. “Yes. But even if humans won that war too long ago for any of them to remember… These dragons died for their cause. Some may not even be willing to consider it.”

“It’s… I get it. It’s hard, to realize your pain ultimately meant nothing.” Luka said softly. His firelight flickered as he stammered “Um, what I mean is that I think humans and dragons aren’t all that different, is all.”

“Well, perhaps it does not mean nothing, if this works out.” Snatcher turned the mask to face him. “So, Mask, perhaps we know of each other, hm? I am Lukianos, the Soul-Snatcher, abdicated lawkeeper of the Fire Clan. Whom do I have the pleasure of speaking to?”

At first, nothing. And then, Snatcher felt Luka startle as a voice echoed from the mask, smooth as sea-silk. “It has been… so very long, since I have spoken to another. I am the Moon-Jumper, of the Silent Clan. Tell me, what brings a fellow dragon to freely wander the halls of this manmade prison?”

Suspicion. Good, good! That Moon-Jumper still had the presence of mind and calm clarity to display such caution was exactly what Snatcher had hoped for. “Well, that’s a very long story, but if you want to hear it, I’m sure we all have the time…”