"While you were out, I carried you to the bathroom and cleaned you up." Narissa explained. Ty and the lizard woman now sat in the downstairs kitchen in the dark. There was an atmosphere of post-disaster still hanging in the air. The feeling was joint dread. "Then I grabbed the other two and washed them in the sink."
"All right." Ty nodded. "So let's go back a bit." He nursed a cup of tea Narissa had made for him and sighed, his head still pounding from the strain it had endured.
"I just found out, because I flipped back to my side for a while and talked to some of my elders, see, that it is possible to affect the fifth dimension with your power." She sighed sheepishly. "Like I said you couldn't."
"Wait, you didn't know?" Ty raised an eyebrow. "You, the interdimensional shapeshifting reptile woman?"
"I'll keep it brief." She started, leaning back in her chair and crossing a scaly leg over the other. "Basically, we took away my ability to control how your changes affect me."
"Yes." Ty nodded. "I've got that part. Why did it do that?"
"You made me younger." She considered with a slight smile despite the air of doom. "That part was nice. But what happened is my body here started to pull all of me from over there. It was a collapsing effect, so because I was that age here all the forces around me were trying to pull every version of me back into that body, forcing me to become what I was in another lifetime."
"I think I get it." Ty blinked, eyes wide in total comprehending terror. "So... forcing your soul back into the body we had here?"
"Not just my soul." Narissa blushed deeply, this time out of obvious regret and a little genuine fear. "All my timelines and past lives were merging to a single point. As in all of my history, experiences, knowledge, and even my very consciousness were trying to revert back to a point in my first existance when I was a 15 year old girl living with my dad on a navy ship. By taking away my control, we... almost killed me as you know me and almost undid over a million years of Narissa."
Ty took a moment. A long moment. They both sat back nervously and let the point sink in.
"We're going to be really fucking careful from here on out." Ty said sternly. "Because I don't want to be responsible for that kind of shit. What would I have done if I had lost you like that? Forever?"
"Oh, I agree!" Narissa almost laughed. "Believe me, I'm going to be much more aware of how one choice can do so much damage."
"Are they mad at you?" Ty said softly. "Like... the other side?"
"Oh, no!" The lizard waved her hand casually. "We don't... uh, like being mad isn't a thing over there. The elders just had me remember that I still have a lot to learn."
"Do the elders know everything?" Ty cocked his head to the side. "Like... more than you?"
"Don't picture a bunch of old wise sages sitting at a table dispensing cryptic advice." Narissa chuckled, letting out a sigh of relief as the fear passed. "They're more like people who are really good at a bunch of different things and offer really good moral support."
"So no?" Ty grinned.
"That would be a no." Narissa nodded. "Everything is a really really huge amount of things to know. We think the only thing that knows everything is the source. Or God. Or whatever you want to call him, her, or it. But then there's camps that think source doesn't know everything, because we exist. It's one of those paradoxes."
"Okay." Ty nodded, overwhelmed once again. "In any case, I am very very glad I'm not stuck with a clueless and scared little Narissa I can't understand."
"I was speaking Drac?!" She leaned forward, surprised. "I guess that makes sense. That's all I knew back then."
"Is that what that noise was?" Ty deadpanned.
"Shut up. It can be an elegant language, if you can get past all the hissing. Now then." Narissa sighed, raising from her chair and approaching Ty with soft footsteps. "After all I put you through today, you know what you deserve?"
"What?" Ty gulped, shrinking back in his seat as Narissa kneeled down in front of him.
"This." Narissa sighed in relief, kneeling down and holding her powerful reptilian arms around Ty. "I'm sorry. I'll be a better teacher."
* * *
In the darkest of darkness, just past the perception of the third dimension, a lower forth dimensional entity sat on top of a shadow version of a hill overlooking a valley. Devoid of light, the trees had long since rotted and died, husks of their former colour and beauty. The land, bathed in perpetual moonless dark, cast an eerie reflection of what little light there was. A dim wasteland stretched out before Raagar, the starved and ragged leader of a starved and ragged reptilian species.
Before him, a lone figure appeared in the darkness, trudging up the base of hill to meet the merciless and once powerful alpha Dracon. The man in black kneeled crisply before the nine foot tall pale lizard man and bowed in respect.
"I expect you have something to report." Raagar sneered. "Make it quick."
"I have identified a possible saviour." The man in black said, his strange mode of speech non-existant in the fourth dimension.
"Indeed? Then I have felt it." Raagar nodded solemnly. "Who accompanies him?"
"A female of the Capellian tribe. She is beyond a doubt serving the Alliance." The man in black rose and tipped his hat. "Do you require more?"
"No." Raagar growled, a deep and terrifying growl, his wings fluttering behind him in annoyance, blood red eyes stabbing through the dark. "Leave me."
The man in black bowed again, and vanished in a swirl of dust.
"Keela." Raagar whispered.
Elsewhere, in another area of the darkness that was the in between, a huge Draconian female raised her head. Eons older than Raagar, the elder dragoness rattled her spines and scales and lifted her head to the air. < You dare to bother me? > She responded in thought speak, her voice a permenant and acidic growl.
< A thousand pardons, Ciakar. > Raagar responded, unusually tactful. < I have new information that may serve our cause. >
< Our cause is dead. > Keela growled through space and time, imbuing a sense of total despair and rage. < We will soon be dead as well. >
Telepathically, Raagar transmitted the words of the man in black. "...A possible saviour..."
Instantly, the nine foot tall Alpha Dracon was dwarfed by a ferocious goddess of power. Though withered by time and weakened by their decaying surroundings, Keela, of the Royal Ciakar, was no less impressive in her size or terror inducing silhouette. Even in the darkness she radiated pure unbridled hatred and a stomach-churning rage that made Raagar, no slouch to the ways of darkness, shudder in her mere presense.
This was not helped by her waking death-like state of decay. Once a regal red, her flesh had begun to rot away and in places her scales were pulled tight over shrunken atrophied muscle. One of her eyes had begun to pour from its socket in a slimy milk, while her snout was pulled into a permenant grimace on one side from her flesh pulling away from her lips.
"Look well upon your own fate." Keela snarled, saliva pouring from the tip of her muzzle as she spoke through ichor and rot. "You have failed us, Draco. Even now, the Alliance celebrates the near-liberation of Terra. So close to the edge of failure are you, that we have nothing to sustain ourselves. Soon you will begin to rot from within too, and when you are gone, not even your bones will remain. Lucky for you I will be gone long before that, a carcass of fouled meat where once there stood the most powerful of the last of the Royal blood."
Raagar shuddered beneath the ghastly sight of the Draconian's vile form, all too keen of his weakening and frailing body, his lessened musculature, the pain and tightness in his decaying flesh. Deep within, he had already turned sour, and indeed, he would not be far behind her.
"Look at me, fool." Keela command, her vile rasp snapping Raagar back to attention beneath her death's stare. "There are no more chances to be had. You have no soul within you to save, and I have no blood left to spill. It has long since congealed. You were meant to bring us back from this... this grisly fate. All of our soldiers have long since been lost to defeat after defeat. The spectre comes for us both. And then... oblivion."
"I can still stop it." Raagar said quietly. "There is still a chance before we are lost forever."
"As you said decades ago!!" Keela bellowed, swaying her tail with such force the spine of her vertebrae punctured through her weakened skin in points. "What a failure I have pinned my hopes upon! What a pathetic weakling I have placed my trust in. What a coward and heel I have placed in command. You have wrought us nothing but ruin!"
"I still have one more card to play in this game. And then, either way, it is done." Raagar hung his head. "You must summon the last of yourself to assist me. What have you to lose?"
"I have nothing left to give you." Keela snarled, black tar dripping from the open sores on her body. "Do what you will. Leave me to die, at last, in peace. I will see you in the hell of nothingness, of that I am sure, where the mind is alive but without form, unending and in torment."
With a whisp of stale air, the great and horrifying dragoness was gone.
Raagar sat back down on the top of the hill to observe a dearth of life below him. A fine allegory for what was left of his Empire of long ago. He sighed heavily, and summoned his lieutenant. The clacking of bones could be heard below as a walking corpse of a lizard shuffled into view.
"M'lord." The skeletal reptilian growled. "What is thy bidding?"
"Find me a suitable host." Raagar said simply. "This will be our last journey across the veil."
"Very well, Lord." The lieutenant rasped.
They both faded from view.