Oleuni’s lonely light slipped into my room and glowed the curtains. I roused awake… and then it faded, just as when the first dawn ring stormed in some time earlier; after that, it’d only taken the moments to find the pillow aflung somewhere and bury my head under it before I floated back to sleep. I murmured promises about getting up soon and that’s all I remember.
later.
Get up! To help with that???—??really???—??I played around with my sheets. Doing something should keep me awake, at least. I had to get up.
sharp. I needed to file them. Maybe I’d do it today or tomorrow.
wraiths, walking, and then the meeting.
dove into the covers, immersed myself in sleep. The memories pulled at the stitches of my dreams, and they gave me one last shudder before they drained from my mind:
Tripping, falling into the glowing maw of the lake, even my trout slipping away from me as I melted.
A perfumed olm leaping from the gilded plates of a dining slab, eating my tongue.
A creepy human lumbering in the sulfuric clouds of Berwem, somehow dewing without fangs, and begging for me to just bury it.
A shadow slinking through the vog, through the molten glass, through the water in my canteen, stealing the obsidian knife and bleeding away.
Wraiths with mocking dragon voices that destroyed everything I tried to build.
A mud-dweller with writhing frills, waving a shining bronze sword, saying, “Listen, I’ll take those fangs off you, Specter-eti.”
Digrif finally remembering my name, except he pronounced it just like mother.
Cynfe towering above me, ripping my wings off as her scales reddened to a bright scarlet.
Hinte walking away, again and again.
Hinte. Hinte, the friend I didn’t deserve, who I’d nearly left to???—??a fate with the humans.
“Will I see you in the morning?” “Yes!”
didn’t have time! Hinte expected me at her house???—??and I didn’t know when!
Eww! I wiped at my jaw; but I didn’t feel the cool smoothness of my scales. Instead, I felt a rough, shattered surface of glass moving as my foreleg, and my unclouding eyes met???—??the murky glass of Berwem.
have to share with Chwithach.
had been one day Sinig couldn’t joke about me being late, though.
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There came a loud knocking at the door.
need it, in the cliffs???—??dragons here didn’t wear more than a ventcloth unless they had a reason to.
let myself get that angry, in a long time.
cloak I had so far, my Specter cloak. K??rmkieli glyphs swirled across its silvery, cloud-gray surface. For buttons and decorations the cloak had precious gemstones. In the breast my name had been calligraphed in such a commanding style that it looked down on me even as I held it in my feet.
gleamed. It reminded me of some the noble ladies in the higher houses of sky, who shined their scales. It looked beautiful. Tedious, but beautiful. Her eyes and sclerae were a shade dark enough you mistook for black.
Oh? What for?”
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Uvidet had disappeared down the stairwall, waving me bye with her tail. She twirled her tail in a circle instead of the side-to-side I saw so often.
hideous!
revealing, more than anything I could have gotten away with as a fledgling. But, with the heat and winds that blew as zephyrs instead of near-constant gales, you couldn’t really be surprised.
could not fly out with my forelegs looking like this! Having yet to live through a gray season, I had no ashcloaks, or any kind of cloak besides my Specter cloak. I had a raincloak, but it might look frilly in the clear weather.
weighed, a reminder of what I’d ran away from. I felt the empty receptacle where the cloak’s plackets met just below the neck.
image. I had brought it with me to Gwymr/Frina. Because it was mine, not because it was anything more than a piece of trash to me.
beauty of it, could net me plenty. But the empty receptacle once held a shard of star-blessed Stellaine, the stone that fueled the magic of the cloaks. If I could repair that, find some Stellaine down here or another fuel source, it would be an implement again. I could live my whole life from selling of it.
striking, regal. Maybe it would overwhelm, but better to try too hard than not hard enough, right?
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The cloak was over my torso once more. My wings had found their coverings; it ran down the forearm to the alula, and trailed ribbons for each finger of my wing. It dragged???—??of course it dragged???—??but it looked elegant. I’d ripped the ribbons, and they snapped with a click of clasps undoing.
too craggy. It looked uneven, natural ground; but I’d feel comfortable resting a drink on the floor. Another bit of local weirdness.
diminutive in a odd way. She was smaller than me even, and her voice sounded whispery even when she spoke up; her wings seemed to forever hug her body, and she didn’t say much when she did speak.
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