[Suzerain of Sheol]

Even as he drove his sword through the first fiend's viscid heart – splitting the plates of its mottled, exoskeletal breastbone and driving downward – its sibling's axe descended behind Kyarr in a crashing arc. He twisted in desperation, letting go his hold on his own weapon and dropping to his knees, but the blow was true, driven with unholy strength through shrieking air and into Kyarr's back.

His face collided with the charred and bloody tiles of the chapel. There was no sound, and for a moment Kyarr was aware only of the ruin of his body, the concussive squall of pain riding from a snapped spine, from organs lacerated by molten links of burst maille, punctured lungs and shattered ribs, rising in a convulsive gasp that spewed wet, red vomit.

He realized his eyes were open, and the last sight of his mortal moments would be her. It was all he could ask for at the end – he'd followed her as far as he could, and to look upon her now, as the life poured from him by seconds...

Skeye stood defiant before the Apostate as his black power assailed her – he could not touch her, and she would never fall here. Kyarr smiled, weak and wet. She was glorious. Theurgy wrapped his sister in a chrysalis of prismatic lightning, writhing over her armor and weeping from her sword. The sigh of thunder and judgment in her every breath. A spear of power streaked scorching over where Kyarr lay and struck the demon that had laid him open and rendered it to ash.

She looked briefly in his direction, only barely met his gaze as a spasm of black-sparking anguish wracked him and his eyes seized shut. Kyarr screamed what he knew would be his last breath...

And awoke to sunlight.

Drew another breath. Without pain.

A clear sky greeted Kyarr as his eyes slid open, and he could hear the chatter of mockingbirds nearby. Taking a moment to assure himself that he was, in fact, alive, Kyarr sat up from the wild grass and dared to touch his back.

His fingers met bare flesh, but whole. He could feel the tattered edges of his maille, rent and useless, describing the extent of the wound he'd taken.

I should not be alive.

Peeling off the wreckage of his armor, Kyarr looked to the forest around him, but recognized nothing. The lands around the monastery at Eroth had been naked plains, dotted with settlements and heavily trafficked. Wherever he was, Skeye was not here, that much was evident. He could feel her absence as a palpable thing, and almost crumpled at the thought.

If this is Heaven, it will be... lonely.

The wind began to stir,and Kyarr forced himself to move along the trail that led into the trees, as much to avoid thinking of his plight as hope of finding civilization. He wasn't sure he wanted to see a living soul out here, wherever it was.

An hour later, he was deep among the woods, the sun a mere suggestion of day above the thick boughs. Kyarr was aware of his lack of provisions, but he'd seen precious little that he might eat, and no sign of water thus far. The thought was driven from his mind, though, as he rounded a great elm and came to a sparse clearing.

Something is dead here, he realized, inhaling the smell of rot. It took Kyarr a moment to discover the source of the stench, seeing no fallen bodies, but the sight of it when he did was enough to give him pause.

It had been a child, before someone had mutilated it beyond almost any recognition. Spear-sharp stakes had been driven through its wrists, holding it aloft between the trees like a carious marionette. The top of its skull from the bottom of its eyes had been flayed to bone and the crown of the child's brow sawn open. The killer had driven an azure candle into the wound, though the significance of it was lost on Kyarr.

Perhaps this is Hell, instead....

He had seen worse, the mauled and eaten corpses of Eroth's clergy, for one; nonetheless, though, he felt bile rising behind his throat the longer he looked at the savage scene. He made to turn away, but a movement in the brush left him frozen still, eyes darting, hand reaching for his sword only to slap against the empty scabbard at his belt.

Kyarr glanced around the clearing, seeing no obvious avenue of escape, and planted his feet, braced for whatever it was that stalked him. The corpse was far too long dead for it to be the killer, but even so, or perhaps because of it, he was wary for the first time since waking up in this strange place.

[Gallagher]

It had been long since the human-young had been slain, longer now than the time it had cared for him. The woods were not home, but like the human-young when it lived, home was a memory farther than it was near. Today, like every today, all that was left was the woods. The woods were safe against dangers he did not know yet feared all the same, and provided food that he could catch with strength he had not yet grown into, but the woods were getting smaller with every today that passed. Soon, they too would be like home and like the human-young.

But that was for a different today than this.

This today he needed to feed, and his eye was on a large rodent he had seen leave its den. As it scavenged for food, he crouched up in the branches of the trees, his wings folded tight against his sides and his claws digging shallow gauges into the bark as he found traction. Then, a sound, something large and heavy. The rodent stilled and he tilted his head, flattening himself against the branch. A human-male had found the human-young. Not a worry for one such as himself, but for a rodent -- his prospective meal ran and set the human-male off into its own pounce. So much for that, it seemed. Still, a human of any sort might have an easier meat. Shaking off the failed hunt with a flutter of his wings, he climbed back along the branch and down the tree's trunk, scraping and thumping loudly along the way.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Kyarr took a step back and watched the strange creature in its awkward descent from the boughs. It did not look like any demon he had ever encountered, lacking the overt design for slaughter and destruction the children of Infernus exhibited. In fact, it looked more like... a dragon. A very small dragon, climbing down a tree rather than gliding to the ground.

This is a strange place I have come to. No one living, to his knowledge, had witnessed a true dragon in hundreds, if not thousands of years, sequestered as they were in the sanctuaries of their aloof God, indifferent to the wars of men and fiends. To believe legend, not even the appeals of angels were given answer from the crystalline battlements of Xathron Deir, and some tales told it that the dragons were wracked with such grief for the death of their Mother in the oldest age of Creation, that they could not stir themselves to join the war for which they had been bred.

And yet, here was a dragon, or something aspiring to be a dragon at any rate -- it was rather small, for the grandeur of myth surrounding the mighty creatures. Kyarr resigned to watch it for the moment, confident that he could deal with the tiny beast if it attempted to make him prey.

[Gallagher]

No sooner had his forefeet touched the ground that he arched in a great bow, his long tail curling above his back. He straightened and shook, wings stretching, fluttering, and folding before his eyes found the human-male once again.

It was larger from down here, far larger than the human-young had been. That shouldn't have been a surprise, but his memory was filled with more treetops than humantops. Or humanknees, as the case may be.

"You have meat?" he asked it, his teeth clicking with the last sound.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

The words touched his ears, but it was a moment before the shock of hearing the thing speak registered to Kyarr. The words were simple, of course, both in diction and intent, and he considered ignoring the beast and walking away, but it was the first seeming-intelligent creature to cross his path since he'd arrived here.

"No," he answered, and realized that the lack of food would fast become a problem for him. He nodded at the carcass. "I take it that wasn't you, then? Looks edible enough for a dragon."

He relaxed his posture slightly, trusting the thing's spoken overture as a sign that it didn't mean to attack him. He decided to chance a question of his own. "Are there others of my kind near here? I don't suppose you know where *here* is...?"

[Gallagher]

He sat up on his hind legs, limbs pulled close to his torso, and watched the human-male closely, his head turning this way and that. It may not have had any purpose, but it was the only human that hadn't chased him off before he could say a word.

When the human-male eased off of its defenses, so did he, only then allowing his attention to turn to the hanging body, then back again. "Friends are not meat. What beast does not matter. Humans gather past the trees, where human-young looks."

[Suzerain of Sheol]

"I don't think he's looking much of anywhere, anymore," Kyarr muttered, turning to scan the treeline. He had no way of knowing if the dragon meant that a mile, or half a continent lay between them and wherever humans dwelt in these lands.

He faced his companion once more, gestured casually at the corpse. "Oddly specific, the way your, er, friend there met his end. Any scent of who or what did that to him? The candle is... elaborate." He felt absurd, engaging with the seemingly barely-literate intelligence sitting across the clearing, but he needed answers of some kind to ground himself in this strange circumstance, and the dragon was his only chance for that.

Kyarr looked around in growing unease, still seeing nothing else alive. He was keen to get out of the forest and find civilization, not favoring his chances against the boy's murderer unarmored and with bare fists.

And thirsty. Right.

[Gallagher]

"Too long for scents." He looked up towards the sky, peering down from between branches and leaves. After a moment, he lowered his head, long neck curving as he scratched his face with the side of his wing. "The moon was small then. Rain has come, and gone, and come again. It is dangerous to find the human gathering alone."

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Kyar's eyes narrowed. "Why dangerous? What lives in these woods?" Besides talking reptiles....

[Gallagher]

He looked at the human-male and stood, his front claws meeting the ground with a thump and crackle of leaves. "The woods are not dangerous. There is no cover past the trees."

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Stifling a groan of frustration, Kyarr motioned in the thing's direction, remarking, "Well, if you're what passes for a dragon around here, the danger can't be that terrible." If anything, the humans nearby would be more threatening to an outsider than whatever foxes or snakes the dragon was afraid of.

He paused for a moment, considering that he'd been given only the vaguest of directions. "Still, you don't seem to be particularly... busy here, if you're not going to devour the poor kid's carcass or whatever dragons are supposed to do. Why don't you show me the way to village?"

Because walking in with a dragon at my side is sure to win them over to me....

[Gallagher]

Though he growled at the human-male's words, the sound was worthy only of a beast half his size. His tail flicking, he walked towards the hanging corpse. "I grow, bigger than human-young, bigger than human-grown." Stopping beneath the body, he turned, looked up at it, then down to his feet, shifting a minuscule fraction to one side. Finally, he trotted forward, across the clearing and to the trees, casting a glance in the human-male's direction. "You will buy me meat from the others. They do not share."

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Kyarr rather doubted the dragon understood the first thing about economics, if he thought he'd be purchasing anything in the near future, given that he hadn't exactly thought to bring his coin-purse into the besieged monastery. Nonetheless, he chuckled. "Well, aren't they bastardly then? Let's see if we can change their minds. Lead the way."

Pondering the myriad ways this could go horribly wrong, Kyarr asked idly, "So, do dragons like you have names?"

[Gallagher]

He didn't look back at the human-male, but as he trotted around small rocks and hopped over twigs along their path, he answered, "Human-young called my kind Taubche. I was called Lindche in my nest."

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Nest. And here I thought dragons just coalesced from raw Theurgy out of the firmament. I suppose we do live in a fallen world, after all. Kyarr did his best to follow Lindche's uneven path through the trees, taking care not to misstep -- the last thing he needed was a broken ankle.

He had the absurd thought for a moment of bringing the creature back to Skeye as a pet before crushing it with the knowledge of his sister's place in the world. The woman she might have been, who might have delighted in a pet dragon, had never been allowed to live. If anything, she'd have seen it gowned in silver armor and ridden the thing into battle, her sword burning brighter than the fire the thing could presumably spew.

Not that he had any clue where Skeye was now, or how he'd ever find her again.

He resolved to store that thought for another, less demanding moment and asked Lindche, "What are these humans like, anyway? I need to know what I'm walking into." Visions of the agonized Disciples mutilating their own bodies to release the toxic magick in their blood came unbidden, and were promptly buried again.

[Gallagher]

"Humans are humans." How strange, for a human to not know about its own. "Humans that gather here have power. Human-young told me that others do not. That these are special. I do not believe, humans come to learn, they must have it before they come."