When I cracked my eye open again, it was some time later. I wasn’t exactly sure how long it had been, but it felt like I had lost a day or two. Designing enchantments for my lair had taken up almost all of my attention. I didn’t have a lot of time to complete what I considered the ‘minimum’ amount necessary to protect myself.

  Given that I’d only recently been introduced to enchantment as a concept, the process took a great deal of trial and error. Enchantments which might be sufficient to stop a human, even a Wizard, would be entirely insufficient to hold back a hostile Dragon that wished to enter my lair while I slept. That meant that the enchantments needed to be more powerful than the few examples I’d seen by an order of magnitude.

  More power directly led to more complications. Magic was fickle. Casting a spell focused by the strength of my Intent was not much of an issue. I’d noticed that I did not deal with the same difficulties suffered by Wizards and Sorcerers, from imprecise wording or a momentary break in concentration.

  The problem was that enchantments would need to work without my Intent actively focused upon them. They would be sitting unattended for a year or more. I needed a great deal of specificity to be worked into the instructions, so that the magic protected my lair from intruders, but did not lash out at those I considered my allies.

  Sixth was once again a great boon to this effort. Trapped first in my mind and then inside a hunk of morganite crystal, she had little to occupy herself with other than spellwork. She didn’t have the same kind of distractions I did, that came with having a body. The need to sleep, eat, or adjust a leg’s position due to discomfort did not affect her.

  She was still incredibly irritated by being accidentally booted out of my head, but focused that frustration into crafting a series of particularly creative and ‘nasty’ traps for anyone who wanted to invade my Den. Apparently, the variety of magic drowning my core contained a number of insights into different kinds of magic. I had no idea what inspired Sixth to create a rune that made someone’s entire body itch like it was covered in ants, but it gave me a newfound wariness to her abilities and vindictiveness.

  My contemplation of enchantment was interrupted by someone entering my Den. I had expected to see Cassia or Visk return. The two of them very well might have, only to depart once more when they saw me completely focused on magic. Instead, it was Edith who walked in. She was carrying a small lantern to light her way, as she couldn’t see in the dark like I could.

  I raised my head from where it had been laid across my front legs. During my time working on enchantments, I had swept as much of my treasure hoard back together as I could with my tail. I now laid coiled around it, as it wasn’t quite large enough for me to sleep on it like my instincts told me to.

  “Edith,” I rumbled as she approached the flat area my hoard sat on top of. “How is Magnus? I cannot imagine you would leave his side, if he was doing poorly.”

  Edith walked all the way up from the entrance to my Den to stand close to my head before she responded. She set the lantern down at her feet and then went to sit down on the hard stone floor. A deep sigh of weariness passed her lips.

  “Ye’ know Beasty, after drinking that potion in Greenreimse, I felt like a young woman again,” she said rather than answer my question directly. “I’d hoped that maybe all the cares and worries that came with my actual age would disappear just like the wrinkles on my face… but I guess that was a bit too optimistic, aye?”

  I let Edith speak uninterrupted. She seemed to need to get something off of her chest, so to speak. The broach I’d given her was still tied up into her hair. Her fingers reached up and brushed it. I could see that her hands were stained from handling herbs recently.

  “... Magnus is… I’m not going to say the lad is fine, ‘cause he’s not,” Edith said eventually. “Whatever happened t’ him, it’s crippled him. I got… kind of the general idea from Visk and Cassia, but I wanted to hear it from you.”

  I could feel Edith’s ire settle on top of me. My oath had been to bring back Magnus to her. While it might not have been explicitly spelled out, that ‘safe and unharmed’ was a part of that Oath, the Intent I’d used at the time would carry that sentiment under it. It’s not like I wanted to nit-pick details with Edith anyways. I’d brought the child she considered to be her own back to her grievously injured.

  “The one who kidnapped Magnus, the Wizard, served a powerful monster,” I rumbled when it was my time to speak. “It was called a ‘Vampyr’. I was only told a little bit about it by those who aided us, but they said it preyed upon the lives of the living, consuming them to grow stronger.”

  “That sounds familiar,” Edith interjected testily. While the unspoken comparison to me hurt, I couldn’t really object to it at the moment. I myself had many questions about what possible relation the monster could have to me and other Dragons.

  “By the time we had fought our way through the city and the creature’s lair, the Vampyr had sunk its claws deep into Magnus,” I continued. “The creature manipulated him into healing it with his magic and used that to try and suck him dry. I was able to sever that connection, but it was in the midst of battle. I could not be… delicate with it.”

  Edith stared at me for a long time in silence before speaking again. “He may not have died, Beasty, but I’m not sure if he will be able to ‘live’ either. While it’s still early… It’ll be a miracle if he walks again. It’s worse than when we healed him the first time. That sickness had drained his body to almost nothing. This… the magic inside of his body was injured. He’s awake, but he goes through frequent convulsions.”

  “... More than that… he doesn’t remember me, Sanguine. He doesn’t remember anything. The latest thing he can recall was when he was a little child. All he wants is his mother. He calls out for her but…” Edith looked down at the floor. “She’s gone, along with the rest of his family. I already told you that they abandoned him, yes?”

  I nodded in response. Magnus’s family had written him off for dead and left him behind at Edith’s house when they moved on. There was no telling where they’d relocated to by now.

  “I asked ye to bring back my boy, but it’s almost like ye didn’t. Like ye brought back a complete stranger.” Edith looked back at me, staring into my amber eyes. “That’s pretty awful of me to say, ain’t it? Here’s a child who needs me more than ever, but all I can think about is how it hurts me.”

  “When I was in the city…,” I started to say slowly. “I saw a lot of humans. Good ones, bad ones, and others that didn’t seem to… ‘fit’ anywhere in particular.” My wings shifted to a more comfortable position as I focused on Edith. “A great many of them were self-serving creatures, who only thought about what they could extract from other people.”

  I looked Edith in the eye. “You don’t strike me as someone like that, Edith. One thing I learned quite well in Osteriath, is that humans suffer when they try to handle things on their own. For better or for worse, you are creatures that thrive in groups. It is something that makes me different from you, as a Dragon.”

  “So ye wouldn’t suffer, if me and Cassia were gone?” Edith asked incredulously. “That seems a bit hard to believe.”

  “It’s not about whether it would hurt me or not… but whether it would change what I am as a person,” I clarified after some thought. “I nearly did lose Cassia when we fought the Vampyr. You saw the wound in her gut, I’m sure. When that happened…” I turned my eyes to stare up into the ceiling of the cavern. “What I felt was not sadness or loss. It was a boundless rage. One that felt more natural to me than anything else I’ve ever felt. It was a part of me, down to my very bones.”

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  “That’s not exactly reassuring, Sanguine,” Edith said afterwards. She folded her hands in her lap and grimaced at me. “I came in here to… I don’t know exactly what I was going to do. I wanted to decide what to do with you, I guess.”

  “... I care about you, Edith.” My tail rose off the floor and slowly waved across the stone floor behind me as my claws traced the ground in front of me. “When I swore that Oath to you, I did so because I was afraid that if I didn’t, I would lose whatever nameless bond lay between us. Now… I don’t think there is anything that I can do.”

  “I guess ye really did learn a thing or two in the city, Beasty,” Edith said sadly. She reached up and took off the broach I had given her. Her eyes stared at it for a long time. “It weren’t ye’r fault, that T’laanga died. It also wasn’t ye’r fault that a ‘Vampyr’ tried to eat Magnus… But if I keep blaming ye in my heart, that doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “I don’t think it does.” It wasn’t a pleasant truth. All of us that had gone to the city had done so to save Magnus, but in large part we’d done it for Edith. If all the pain and trouble we’d gone through didn’t change Edith’s mind, nothing would.

  “I…” Edith’s hand tightened on the broach. “It’s not fair. Not fair to ye, or anyone else. But I don’t think I can forgive, not as I am.” She looked back at me before she placed the broach on the ground between us. “That isn’t ye’r fault. None of it was. I think…”

  She bit her lip so hard that I could smell her blood tinging the air. “I’m broken, Sanguine. Not my body, but my heart. It’s been shattered over and over again, and I don’t think I have the strength to piece it back together, even with other people’s help.”

  Edith stood up from where she was sitting. “Once I’ve finished getting everyone healed up, I’m going to leave, Sanguine. I’m going to head back to my homeland and deal with the things that I’ve been running away from for what feels like my entire life.”

  “You do not need to confront those things alone, Edith,” I replied angrily. My scales rippled as a deep growl rolled up out of my throat. “How is that any different than repeating the mistakes of the past?” My claws picked up the broach delicately, and shoved it back against her chest. The action jostled her backwards a step. “Go if you must, but do not think that going alone, even to confront your demons, is any different than running away.”

  Edith glared at me from how I’d pushed her, but after a moment, she took the broach back. I could smell the conflict radiating off of her. While she may have looked like a woman in her mid twenties, Edith was in reality a fair bit older. She’d had a lot of years to develop a stubborn streak which now came into conflict with my own.

  The war between our Intents was a subtle thing. I could have probably forced the issue, but that wasn’t the point. Edith had to choose for herself whether she was going to keep running away, or try and make peace with the world when it disappointed her. Finally, she looked away and shoved the broach into one of her apron pockets.

  She didn’t say anything else to me as she picked up her lantern and started walking out of my Den. As I watched her leave, that same sense of frustration I’d felt when Cassia got hurt burned in my gut. Edith wasn’t physically hurt, but she was wounded in a way that was beyond the ability of my magic to heal. Maybe if I had more time before I was forced to sleep, I could have talked her around.

  There was no longer enough time.

  “B-boss?” I heard someone say from nearby.

  I tried to lift my eyelid, but I wasn’t able to do so any more. The weight of sleep was dragging down my body into the ground. Even the effort of paying attention to someone else was a great burden on my mind.

  After Edith left, I’d poured all of my frustration into the enchantments that Sixth and I had designed. I’d carved them into my lair with my own claws, scratching out the swirling marks with as much care as I could muster. As each enchantment was finished, the light within the cavern began to dim. It had been a cool twilight when I started. By the end, it was as dark as a starless night.

  “Yeah, Visk?” I managed to rumble out. My voice was a deep and sonorous whisper, felt through the floor rather than heard in the air.

  “Edith uhm… Edith packed up her stuff and left Boss. She took the horse and wagon with her…”

  “It’s fine, Visk.” My wing managed to slide just enough so that someone could plausibly crawl underneath it. “C’mere.”

  There were a couple of moments of strained silence before I felt Visk come closer to me. They had to crawl across my neck to get to the ‘circle’ inside where my body had made a loop around my treasure hoard. Soft footsteps clinked across coins and crystal geodes before slender fingers grabbed onto my wing. Visk pulled themself under the protective canopy and settled down with their back pressed into my side.

  “I’ve been doing something thinking, Boss, since we got back,” Visk said in a small voice. I could feel what they were saying from where their small back pressed against my scales. “All of that stuff we saw out there… That was terrifying. We all almost died…”

  Visk took a deep breath in and out. “Which… wouldn’t have been so bad, if it was just me.”

  “... I don’t expect you to understand, Boss, not right away anyways.” Visk squirmed against my back to make themself more comfortable as they spoke. For once, they weren’t focused on whatever I might say next. “I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Cassia… because she’d probably not understand. She’d think I was crazy.”

  “...Elves aren’t like humans, Boss. We are our own people, yeah, but we can’t exist by ourselves. You saw a little bit of it in that memory of mine… but we are born as servants. We’re made, grown, to serve something bigger and more powerful than ourselves. It’s not just something we want, it’s something we need.”

  Visk ran their fingers across my scales, tracing them lightly. “We need it like a plant needs sunshine and water. You probably saw it with Veda and their squad. The instant you started flexing your magic power, they latched onto you like moths to a flame. Those Witch Hunters… if they’re all elves, they’re probably serving something like you.”

  “Dragon?” I chuffed out, even as the bonds of sleep clawed at my awareness.

  “Maybe, Boss. I don’t know,” Visk replied quietly. “I didn’t know that Elves could be ‘connected’ to something other than the Dareen and the World Tree… When I left those behind, I was… slowly starving to death. Not from food, but the magic that made me who I was. It took decades for it to happen but…”

  “... I know you want me to be an equal. A companion, rather than a slave. Something you did to me, when you restitched what was broken inside of me… it helped, but I still feel alone.”

  Visk went quiet for a long time after that. When they spoke again, it was a desperate plea, a whisper in the dark. “When you wake up again, Boss… please. Keep me, treasure me?”

  My wing closed and pressed Visk against my body in response. I could feel how their ears twitched across my wing as their face was smooshed into me. They didn’t say anything else, but that seemed to be a sufficient response to get my meaning across.

  The next time my consciousness rose out of the deep, I was floating in an empty space. It was not the ‘between space’ I’d been stuck in after my teleportation spell messed up. I’d now experienced several ‘void’ spaces.

  This one was full of slowly mixing and pooling colors. As I looked around, I realized that this was the ‘dream’ space I’d once used to reach out to Cassia. While it had only been a few months ago, it felt like it had been ages since I’d brought her half dead to Edith’s cabin in the middle of winter.

  Unlike before, I was not able to use my Intent to bring the dream around me under my command. Instead, I felt a familiar presence approaching me. A golden line was attached to the center of my form in this dream plane. Someone was using that golden line to draw themselves towards me, as if they were pulling on a rope.

  After an indeterminate amount of time, I was able to perceive Cassia pulling herself through the dream towards me. She looked much like normal self, except for some reason she was wearing an extremely ‘poofy’ dress.

  “... Don’t say anything,” Cassia grumbled as she finally pulled herself close enough to grab onto me. When she finally did, the connection between us became significantly more intense. It wasn’t quite as mind melting as the first time we’d ‘emotionally bonded’.

  “We need to talk,” I said when we had floated together in silence for a while.