[Dragon]

 Talon left. It's what he does best.

 He left his children with emotional and physical scars, left Nava with twice as many. Pink eye swivels in its socket as he looks around him, paranoia growing, not stopping for longer than it took to eat and shit. His skin crawls with anxiety but the pride in his heart will not allow him to believe it's because he's running away, that he is being hunted. Slipping through the trees of Oukoku-Kai while the resident guard was off salivating over a young soul in the night he ran, not stopping until dawn turned to day. He had collapsed in a pile of matted fur and rotting insides, eye rolling back into his skull as he baked in the open sun.

 Now he walks, more hydrated, but with less purpose.

 Wandering alone for days he finds himself lost more often than not. The land between his captives -- both old and new -- is unfamiliar. When he fled Alteron he did so without direction, and history repeats itself in his flight from the Valley. Scarred and disoriented, he strides through the plains. He hates the lack of cover, the sensation of being watched. Everything in the corner of his tired eye is an enemy looking to strike him down. Every shadow is his past catching up with him.

 It was only a matter of time.

 Continuing through the field of flowers he stops dead at the sight of someone in his path. His eyes narrow and he considers for a moment that he can turn around, that he can turn to the side and bypass the stranger completely. There was no need for interaction. And yet -- he holds his head as high as he can and moves wordlessly towards the stranger, pride rumbling in his chest. They would move for him, most likely out of disgust at his appearance, but they would move.

 "Excuse me."

They all lived out the same recycled stories, far out upon the starless moor.

She fed upon what she pursued and caught. Left the bodies of little Tesni's depopulated tribe unrecognizable, burying a generous bounty of their flesh and bone close to home-for-now, nothing but the teeth and hair and clothing going to waste. She convalesced for the better part of a year, though the frayed pelt still hung loose on her belly and cheeks, and the right side of her face was still no face at all, and she still felt the chronic, phantom pains of pieces that were no longer there... and the silvery hairs on her muzzle continued to multiply... and she viscerally resented, on some clandestine and inaccessible level, the eight years too many that had been forced upon her.

Even monsters grow old.
Even abominations become weary.
Even dragons reflect back on all the sound and fury and terror...

... and muse high upon their hoards why they'd ever wanted it all so much, once upon a time.

The quarter-moon shone bright in the sky above a renegade on her prowls. Its light met with her last living eye and was snared, turning the opaque green to a point of fire that reflected only this. This and nothing else. Those paws, so big, made no sound as they moved her down a winding, foreboding little path that led up to a midway peak of the snow-capped mountains -- and was it there she chose for a time to den? There she could smell everything coming; there she could look down dizzying heights upon the spanning forests. If she wanted. Today she didn't. Today --

she pursued, today. A scent. Familiar. In her brain ignited the only promise she'd ever deign to keep in her brutal life.

Sanctum didn't know. Thought she was meeting an old friend here. He didn't ask questions, her golden boy, and she preferred people that way, when she chose to prefer them at all. When he too left her to have his silly tryst with a jungle girl, Dragon as well had welcomed him back with no questions. It was their way, perhaps. The two soldiers.

In the sunlight, the field of flowers -- buttercups, in specific -- was strikingly bright, a sea of stunning yellow that took the bottom of the mountainside by storm in these parts. Now... the night took them in its hands and turned them drab and gray as anything else it touched, as the stranger now, ragged as she... crossing paths with her... demanding the old wolf move.

The single lime eye blinked slowly, listlessly, and seemed to turn cloudy; she let the hard lines of her face fall slack. But no matter how harmless and hoary she deigned to appear, she was still Dragon. She would not excuse herself. She would not move for him or any other. Unless. She felt. Like doing so.

"I don't see well," was her response, soft and hoarse, the voice of a malevolent Old One at work, "in the dark. I apologize."

She tilted her head to perceive him. Could see him as well as she could smell the buttercups, cloying and heavy in her nostrils.

"Would you consider... leading me to water?"

 Her voice is old and hoarse, and someone with a heart might have thought anything other than; worthless.

 The moon shines overhead, dulling more the soft yellow buttercups below their feet. His eye scans her face for anything, ever paranoid, ever correct. He sees nothing in the old gal's aching face, the scars and hard lines seemingly softer in the quarter moon. Her eye, however. Lime colored and supposedly sightless; he stares into it, a crawling fear growing up his spine as the void of her pupil swallows the light of the stars, leaving everything to the imagination.

 "Would I," he sneers. Face twisting into distaste openly despite her disability. Talon considers her for a moment more, looks over her scars, into the space where another eye should be. Her body screams weathered battle maiden, even if her voice and language whisper that she has been beaten. "I don't talk," he snipes, "I listen."

 Was that not his job once, long ago? To listen to the whispers on the winds. To know everything, anything, to use it to his advantage?

 Talon stands still for a moment longer before huffing, not shy to show he was put out by the gal's request. "Nearby. If you're going to follow me, tell me a story." He pads through the thick flowers and out the other side, heading towards a river in the distance, growing clearer in scent without the thick smell of the buttercups. No wonder she couldn't find the water on her own.

 He listens, he waits. A growing feeling of being watched sends shivers up his spine but he shoves it down to deal with later.

A mangled, reeking, days-old roadkill of a wolf looked upon Dragon and deemed her worthless; an audacious pot called the kettle black.

But even he salvaged a kernel of wisdom weighty enough not to trust the cadaverous absence to her last remaining eye.

"We have that in common, my friend," imparted the renegade of his preference for perceptive silence over speech, though her own words rolled from her tongue with the sort of unbothered smoothness that suggested some innate lack of social fright. A question she'd never ask herself: what does this little wanderer think of me? A worry she'd never feel: do I appear wrongly to him somehow? Like something etched from another time, an older time, and dropped into this one to breathe the dry air.

He seemed irritated with her, as a matter of fact. He disliked her request. That he chose to honor it anyway was all that mattered to Dragon.

"I appreciate that," she thanked him simply, and off they walked, her blind side facing nothing but the bitter night's wind. He smelled vaguely of hot sand and boiling tar. Talon wanted his favor returned, quid pro quo, and he asked her for a story as they approached the distant river. Dragon considered this, reaching absently into herself for something with which she could possibly use to fulfill his request... They were too far from the water for her to evade it somehow.

"There was once a boy," began Dragon, watching the horizon as she spoke, "who was born half-formed. Were his mother only but merciful, that she could have smothered him as a babe. But she did not, and the boy grew all wrong, like a weed-choked blossom. He seemed haphazardly fashioned of nature's unused and unfit pieces, for his features were mismatched, he was constantly ill..."

(She toyed with him, wrapped him in the silk of her web, and he was not even father enough to realize it, was he?)

"... yet he'd a lovely mind, this wretch. A talent in mending. None knew. It was squandered not to his own weakness, but the ineptitude of those who both raised and tormented him."

(The river loomed into sight; she could smell the brine of it.)

"One day, he was set upon by another wolf, and his eye was taken. Perhaps it alone had been beautiful before. The boy grew bitter at this irreversible loss,  and sought to mend only monsters, for in their faces he now saw himself. When once he brought one back from the brink of death, it asked what it might do to repay him. The boy looked into its face without fear and said this: monster, bring me the head of the one who hurt me first. punish the one who started this all and could have stopped it."

(Here it was.)

Dragon bent briefly to scent the water. Licked some of it up. Turned back to Talon, droplets of it lingering about her mouth, before resuming. "It's a story about how we are shaped by the lives we live... and how in the end... we cannot much help what we are. It was inspired by a friend of mine."

She moved closer, as he either drank too or stood waiting. Just a little. But enough.

"You resemble him a great deal, actually."

That feeling of being watched was her studying his face for a sudden flinch, the barest hesitation, a giveaway --

"Talon."

 The night howls around them with bitter wind and dying starlight.

 His passenger walks with her good eye to him, and for a moment he thinks himself the assassin from his youth. Yes. Do not trust me. Something ugly crawls up his spine, an itch in his paws to send him knocking her to the ground. Paranoia and a need to satisfy his wounded ego has him taste her blood in his mouth, wet and metallic as it slides down his throat. Would he go for her eye? Blind her completely and leave her more desperate and helpless than he found her?

 Or did he finally grow tired of playing games -- was it her jugular he covets?

 She starts to speak, and the noose tightens. Her description of the boy does not phase him; he does not care. The weak and the ill were meant to be smothered, ruined, broken beyond repair. Was that not the way he had been taught? Was this not how he taught his children? His mind strays to his children for a moment, not quite recalling their features but seeing them more as wriggling things he had to care for at one point. If he had ever cared at all. Perhaps they were all dead.

 Maybe it was for the best.

 The river draws into sight and his paranoia spikes with it. He could leave, he's fulfilled his part of the deal. She got water and he got company -- they would be looking for a lone wolf, not a pair. It was done, and yet. "What use is a mind if there is no body to see it through?" Disgust curls his lip, a restless sense of needing to leave itching through his belly. It's either pride or arrogance that has him follow her to the water, stopping behind her as she continues.

 He's not a dumb wolf, despite his many many mistakes. He knows. Perhaps he knew this whole time, but refused to see it. Refused to believe it.

 That fucker.

 He was going to win.

 "I think," he says, "you need more competent friends." Face riddled with the ravines of age the swirl of his eye in its socket seems slower as it passes over her face. "He really thinks this will make up for it all?" Quieter, more wistful. His jaw itches, remembering what it was like around tiny throats. In his sleep he can still hear them suffering. "So be it."

 Talon inhales; the brine scent of the river, the coldness of the night, the sound of his old heart beating vile blood. The last things he has. Unless.

 "Tell him I'll see him in hell."

She had grown used to the murderous intent of nipping little dogs. How sweet a nectar the blood servicing her wicked heart would be; how satisfying a victory to take away the life of an infamous conqueror. She knew, even without being privy to Beryl's thoughts -- oh, that ruthless, exquisite woman, Dragon would never find another quite like her, and the lament was as close as she'd ever come to missing someone dearly -- that she'd considered such deadly actions upon her stoic lover on many occasions. It didn't unsettle her. It caused her no pain or sense of betrayal. To live is to devour others.

What use is a mind without a body in good repair to pilot it? But she'd never elevated Isaiah's memory above those of the healthy animals who'd moved in and out of her life, had she? He was only something intriguing. A tiny gem, buried among the rough. Dragon's motivations for all that she did were deep and sometimes alien; to explain why she chose to honor the boy's debt where she'd forsake countless others... it would lose something in translation. And she cared not to explain it. To him. This not-a-father. Talon.

Talon, Talon, Talon.

The name a loaded pistol against his temple. The name his fate spelled out at his feet. The name his every sin crawling on his back.

She stood motionless before him as he condemned her choice in "friends" for the absolute nothing his insults mattered to her. That imperial neck straightening to lift her head far above his own, that facade of dimwitted absence sliding away like liquid metal -- it was all the response he'd need as one by one he walked the steps of the gallows. He was admitting his situation, it seemed. He had dignity enough not to beg her for his life. It was as over for him as it one day would be for her paladin rival. And. He knew it.

Encircling him a moment, closing in, towering over, Dragon doubled back with no warning and shoved him full force, effectively toppling the far smaller wolf to the ground and rolling him toward the awaiting river. The renegade moved fast, and before he could find his feet or try to bite her or any other desperate reflex animals in his predicament tended to have, she snapped him up by the scruff, teeth sharp teeth inexorable, and heaved him bodily those last few inches past the shore before she dropped Talon face-down

and forced his gruesome head underwater

and held it there

and waited.