The humans had long since stepped clear as the dragons had become increasingly amorous, the voices of the dragons adding thunder to the storm outside, which otherwise was just a monotonous static of rain. Although they rutted openly and shamelessly, the humans could only see so much of them switching partners and positions before they got the point, that their dragons had draconic stamina and would most likely keep going all night long, nap, and pick up again in the morning.
Avelia shook her head wryly as she watched her dragon enjoying his role in the tangle, currently at its center as Karyu made a hen of him, and the actual hens, both of them already sloshing with several loads of drake-seed and likely to bear large clutches by them, held him in a complicated three-way lip-lock. "I have never seen Vrack get that way over another drake," she said, clearly surprised to see him behaving in this way. Vrack had no doubt gotten his fill of the hens, but there was only but so pregnant a hen was going to get. At this point, he was giving the hens a much-needed break from Karyu's relentless energy, and the way his hips slammed back against Karyu, he was quite happy to do so, not least because he had an amorous hen snuggled under each wing—Astrid on his right and Hilda on his left—clearly getting a vicarious experience off of it and eager to show their fawning appreciation.
Luke shook his head knowingly. "Karyu is a very special dragon. I led him to believe that any dragon could exterminate an entire island of cultists in a matter of hours. He doesn't know his own power."
Avelia looked up, disturbed. "An entire island in hours? Are you kidding me?"
Luke shook his head. "Not kidding. I am not sure what he is, but Adam's kingdom would have been overrun long ago if not for Karyu. Where you are from, the cultists are a nuisance that trickles in occasionally. For us, they are all that exists for miles around outside our kingdom. It was only after getting Karyu involved that we started turning the tide, since the peasants had lost faith; they were starving, and they were defecting faster than we could breed them. We had been within minutes of the cultists breaking through our last wall, and then Karyu came of age, his flame wreaking havoc on the cultists like Judgment Day. I was ten years old, and I still carried him on my shoulder, then."
"In that first battle, he ran a group of cultists away from where they were about to slaughter a field of our wounded where they were lying near death. His intervention gave us time to get our last surviving witch out to them, where she was able to revive some of them enough to fight, buying us enough time for our last surviving ally to get their dragons in to start turning the tide. Karyu, although he was too young then to have done it all singlehanded, was nevertheless moving like red lightning, his little body flickering in the air too fast for the cultists to target. His flames just kept coming."
"A living weapon of mass destruction," Avelia said wondrously.
In the time that it had taken Luke and Avelia to get their fill of gawking at the scene of draconic mating fury, Oliver and Ethel had gotten out the cards. Also, upon the table where Whiskers and Vaestro had been playing, they had set a bottle of some foreign liquid that was a curious shade of blue that did not seem like it ought to have been possible, and around it, they had set very small cups of fresh, gleaming copper, out of which they were slowly sipping the substance.
Oliver, whose scales were the green that very pure copper would be after a bath in potassium permanganate, had a slender build, and his face was gaunt, with tight lips. Those lips looked to have been set in a certain expression, of a man that was engaged in the act of causing death, for his entire life, which made his current friendly, casual expression look all the more strange and out-of-place. "Come and join us on this happy occasion," he had said in a voice that, for a human, was deep and impossibly resonant.
Luke noticed something peculiar about how the two kilin were going about the game: nobody was keeping a tally of who had won how many hands. With each hand, it seemed like there was a new contest of who was going to win this one in particular. There was no "winning streak." There was no "run of bad luck." There was only the moment. There was only the instant in which victory or defeat would be determined, and there were no second-chances. Once the hand was played, the victor had been determined, always and forever, and the hand would never be repeated.
As the game was played slowly until late into the night, the hands began to go slower, being interspersed with hours of bluffing and conversation. Luke and Avelia slowly got to know the two strange creatures, which were neither drakes nor men. Oliver's face remained set in that same serious, intent expression at all times unless he actually desired to show an emotion to the contrary, seeming to move more intentionally than anyone that Luke had ever seen. Ethel, whose scales were the color of Ceylon cinnamon, was constantly jolly, but over time, it became apparent that his laughter was every bit as much of a mask as that expression worn by Oliver; behind his rosy, chubby cheeks lay a blazing, carnivorous intelligence that never missed a single detail, and Luke knew that, in spite of surface appearances, Ethel could be asked about every stitch on someones clothing and be able to tell someone exactly which ones had gotten reversed and which ones had stabbed the thread.
"These cards have the power to tap into the knowledge of the cosmos," Oliver said over one hand, the dragons still gasping in the background as their courting continued with very little let-up.
"Foretelling?" Luke asked. "I don't believe in that." He waved his hand dismissively.
Oliver shook his head. "True foretelling is impossible for reasons more complex than most people know. The tangled probabilities and variables are simply too much to piece together into one conclusion, even about the simplest things. No, I am talking knowledge of what forces are at work now. For instance..." at that, Oliver started pulling cards out of the deck and citing different interpretations of each. "If you put them together, they say that the 'Lord of Fire is breathing among us.' I am not expert enough to tell you precisely what that means." Karyu's voice was audible huffing in the background as he spoke.
"Quit wasting these people's time with that," Ethel growled, "and let's play the game." With that, Oliver randomized the deck once more, and he went ahead and played his hand.
As the game continued, each player, in turn, began telling their stories, a la The Canterbury Tales.