Archive of Our Own ^beta

"So."

I was slow to look up at the sound of Raidion's voice, as if his thoughts were far away from their small campfire. When he finally did, though, his gaze was sharp, eyes meeting Raidion's without hesitation.

Raidion settled down at his side, inspecting I carefully. "Do you want to talk about it?" he asked.

I grunted, shaking his head and returning his focus to the fire. Raidion obligingly fell quiet, but it was only a few moments later when he felt I shift beside him, his piercing eyes falling on Raidion once more.

"A Raidion is not an elf," he said, voice a familiar rasp with an unfamiliar hitch in it.

"No," Raidion agreed. "It would seem that I'm not. Or at least not the kind of elf I thought I was."

"And I is not a kobold."

Raidion looked at him steadily. "Is that what you want?"

I's brow wrinkled. "Is what's best for tribe," he said mechanically, before frowning a little deeper. "Before-tribe. Tribe that is not - " he gestured around them, at Elowen keeping watch by the edge of the clearing, Kelnys and Dolly curled into their bedrolls. "This tribe."

"Is it?" Raidion pressed. "Is it what's best for them, or just what's easiest for Themself?"

I lifted a small shoulder in a shrug. "Mights be the same thing."

"Might be," Raidion allowed. "Do you want to know what I think?"

I of a few months ago would have answered immediately with a dubious "yeeesssssss?" whether or not he truly wanted Raidion's opinion. This I, so much the same and yet changed in so many ways, paused carefully to consider. "I does," he finally decided.

"I think that Themself is being woefully short sighted."

I frowned. "Their eyes are as good as I's eyes. Maybe better."

"No, I don't mean that kind of sight. I mean like looking into the future."

"Ah," I replied wisely. "Is metaphor."

"A metaphor, right," Raidion agreed. "What I mean is, Themself is so concerned with the immediate safety of the kobolds that they refuse to consider that what happens beyond the walls of their caves may someday get so bad that it bleeds inside, and there will be nowhere left for them to go."

"Themself is very powerful," I pointed out.

"They are," Raidion allowed. "But so is this." He tapped the pouch at his side holding the deck of cards. "So is the Spider Prince. So are many things beyond Reliquiae that we can't even begin to imagine."

I peered at him for a moment, and when he replied, it was not with any response Raidion had been expecting.

"Do you know what is 'eladrin'?" he asked.

Raidion startled slightly, but shook his head. "I don't remember," he said. "I asked the others, but none of them had ever heard the word. Themself mentioning summer reminded Dolly of an old legend she'd heard about elves who would change with the seasons, but even she has only the vaguest of recollections." He shrugged. "Maybe I'm powerful," he said with a teasing lilt to the words.

"You is," I replied without hesitation.

Raidion offered him half a smile. "Thank you," he said sincerely.

I frowned deeply, as if Raidion had objected. "You is," he insisted. "Maybe you is elf, maybe you is not elf, but you is a Raidion."

Raidion couldn't keep the smile from blooming fully across his face. "And you're I," he said. "Whether or not you continue to think of yourself as a kobold, you are part of a tribe."

"A Newly Dead."

"Not so newly anymore," Raidion said. He gestured at the dirt beside the fire, recalling the floor of the cave. "I liked that, by the way. The little symbol you made for us."

"Tribes needs a picture," I said. "Is how you know tribe."

Raidion rubbed at the back of his hand through his bandages. "I always wanted to get a tattoo," he said. He gave a self deprecating smile. "Well, for whatever 'always' means to me."

I reached out to take his hand in both of his, using his claws to carefully unwrap the end of his bandages and curl them back around his wrist. There, on the bared skin, sketched out in black, heedless of his scars, was a crescent moon pierced with a sword.

"Tribe," I said, looking pleased with himself.

Raidion rubbed his thumb over the mark. "Tribe," he repeated. He felt a painful surge of emotion as he added, "Family."

"An elfs, a kobolds, a humans, a tieflings, a big scales," I said, giving an elaborate shrug. "Is tribe."

Raidion chuckled. "An elf who's not an elf, a kobold who's not a kobold, a dragonborn raised by elves. I wonder what secrets the Grēnweards and Dolly's family might have been hiding."

"We will longsight," I said with another shrug. Raidion grinned, thinking better of correcting him. I dropped Raidion's hand and reached for his cloak, tugging at it and pointing up into the darkened trees above them.

"I sleeps up tonight?" he asked hopefully.

Raidion shrugged out of the cloak, letting it fall in a heap that nearly covered I entirely. "Of course," he agreed, "if that's what you want."

I draped the cloak around himself and Raidion listened to him scramble up the trunk of the nearest sturdy looking tree.

The forest was deep and dark, heavy with the damp scent of autumn, and just the reminder of the perpetual season here was enough to send Raidion's mind spiraling about Themself's words again. Eladrin. Summer. He stared into the fire, certain he would find no sleep tonight, and was just about to rise to join Elowen at her watch when he heard a skitter beside him and turned to find I hanging fully upside down from a nearby branch.

"Is you coming?" he asked impatiently.

Raidion started. "What, with you?" he asked. He looked up into the tree to find that I had tied the cloak in a wide arc across two branches that were much stronger than he would have needed on his own.

I stretched out a hand to take Raidion's bare one, his claws digging into the design still marked there, tugging him insistently upward. "Is time for sleeps," he said. "We has a long way to go."

Raidion gave a low laugh, thinking of Lathi, of dragons, of the feywild and everything unknown that lay beyond the Allanites. "We sure do," he agreed.

He climbed up behind I and settled into the makeshift hammock, I draping across him like a small scaly blanket, beginning to snore almost immediately. Raidion rested a hand across his back, feeling his chest rise and fall in a soothing rhythm, and soon enough, he drifted into trance as well.

He tumbled into dreams where the voices of the cards echoed around him, and this time, instead of cowering from them, he greeted them as old friends.