Over the past two months, Karyu had become obsessed with his campaign against the cultists, and his sanity was slowly slipping away. Everything in his life was becoming immersed in making battle-plans, and in the time he had not spent actively making preparations for war, he had read every single text or scroll he could obtain from Elisa's library regarding war, including The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. He was quickly becoming a warrior monk.
One day, he was out on an exercise flight. He had been following a grueling exercise regimen in the past two months, and his body, already naturally muscular, had become lean and taut all over. Because he was flying for endurance, rather than for speed, he was scooping his wings through the air in firm, steady strokes, regular as the marching step of a soldier, "FWUMP! FWUMP! FWUMP! FWUMP!" As he had grown to be more physically fit, his exercise flights had come to cover territory that normally would have required him to plan for a week-long trip with several stops.
Laboring behind him was another dragon that was desperately clawing through the air to catch up with Karyu, looking very strung out and clearly out-of-breath. Karyu was already flying steadily at a speed that most dragons could not obtain at a sprint, so this other was very much at his wits' end. His scales were a mixture of greenish-teal and gray, and Karyu was certain that he recognized him from somewhere. "Can we talk?" the other dragon called. Karyu eyed the ground for a place to land, picking a high grassy riverbank, and he winged down. As he and the other one lit there, Karyu got a good look at this dragon. This one Karyu remembered as being a switch, and like most switches, this one was soft-spoken, kind, and mellow, if phlegmatic.
Karyu had, in his previous life, made a sexual rendezvous with a drake every morning. The nights belonged to Luka, and this was without exception. It was only in the wee hours that Karyu...the old Karyu, anyhow...had sought satisfaction from another male. He had a handful of them that he saw more regularly than others, though, although many of them had never thought to exchange names with him. Neurotic and insecure tops, psychotic and deranged bottoms, and phlegmatic and droning switches. Not one had a name he could ever remember, and almost none he really wanted to know.
He remembered better where he met his drakefriends: this one was one that he met out at the mouth of the river, where the water that fed the kingdom flowed its way out into the ocean. This one had become such a regular visit for Karyu that they had started finding each other there on precisely the same day of every month, the fifth, or when Karyu was going to be out on a mission, he would stack up a pile of rocks in an arrangement that stated that the rendezvous had been canceled.
The last three visits he had made to this drake, though, had been different from the usual rutting and departure. After they would rut, he and this drake had stopped leaving each other immediately, instead choosing to lie together on the riverbank and watch the vast volume of water vanish out into the ocean, sometimes mumbling a few words of conversation after a while but otherwise just watching as the sun rose into the sky. In spite of many meetings, though, he had no idea of this drake's name.
"How did you know it was me?" Karyu asked.
"Because you still fly by the same place on the same day of the month," the other drake said. "You don't stop anymore, but I see you wing by after I've waited a while. Twice, now, you just flew over. Well, once over and the other time just close enough for me to catch a glimpse." He glanced over Karyu’s new countenance. Karu’s maw, now black of snout and red of lower jaw, was drawn most naturally into a feral grimace, no longer outwardly showing any compassion except if his mind intended it. His eyes were glowing a baleful shade of yellow. “I don’t know why I thought it was you, though,” Oakmoss added dryly.
Karyu sighed. "Okay, you got me," he admitted. "Why did you come chasing after me, though?" he demanded.
"To apologize, I guess," the other said gloomily. "I did something wrong. I guess I made you mad. I just wish it could have been different, that maybe I could have done better."
Karyu winced at that. "No!" he protested hastily. "Uh, no, please. Things came up in my life."
The greenish-teal and gray drake looked away for a few seconds, gazing dumbly out over the river. After a little while of awkward silence, it seemed almost like he was not going to say anything at all. Finally, though, he spoke. "I guess that most people would say it's fucked-up that we don't know each other's names," he said.
Karyu realized that this was arguably true. He didn't even always talk at all when he made such a rendezvous, much less exchange personal information. It was a little brief excitement in the wee hours of the morning, and then, that part of his life would be forgotten for the rest of the day, as if it had never happened. It was a brief stutter in a world where he played a very different role. "Fair enough," Karyu admitted. "I am Karyu."
"I am Oakmoss," said the other, citing a translation of an Old Draconic name. "Karyu," he echoed.
"Oakmoss," Karyu echoed back as well.
"I also wanted to thank you," said Oakmoss.
"What did I do?" Karyu inquired.
"Giving me an idea what home felt like," Oakmoss said, and he expounded, "I am home wherever you are. You might never want to talk to me again, but I can go through my life, now, and say proudly, to anyone I meet, there was a time when I had a home. There was a time when I felt I was where the gods thought I should be. Even if I can never have it again, Karyu, nothing can take away the fact that I had it, once."
Karyu looked down. "You never said anything," he said.
"Well, I had something to lose, then, if I ran my mouth too much" Oakmoss retorted. "Now, it feels like I've lost everything, but there is one thing you can't take away, no matter how much you hate me. It's the fact that I figured out what thinking I belonged somewhere meant. If you fly away from me now and never look back, I'm not going to sulk, and I won’t pine for you. What you taught me, you can’t unteach. I'll give everything I have in me to feel that way again, and if I ever do, it will be thanks to you. I want you to know, always, you made me better. I guess I just want to make sure you’ve been set free. I want to make sure you know you have done good, even if you have no more to give me.”
The hardness and anger in Karyu's heart was shaken by that. The unselfishness of the speech was something that he had never heard before, at least not from a drake. Some drakes had been quiet and secretive. Others had made a show of being the more dominant drake. A handful of them had tried to be like this one, but they had lacked the passion that this one had, coming across as catty and entitled. Oakmoss was different. Oakmoss was here humbled before him, submissively offering himself to be taken or left behind. Oakmoss was not attaching any strings to Karyu to hold him. Oakmoss was prepared to let Karyu go, in this moment, with eyes shining with gratitude and kindness. Oakmoss was not threatening to plunge his body into the ocean. Oakmoss was not claiming to be aggrieved. There was no superficial cheer, in Oakmoss, attempting to mask underlying brokenness. This was the same soft-spoken, pensive, philosophical, and kind creature that Karyu had bonded with so many times, in the secret hours.
“Would you take a rider?” Karyu heard someone say, in his voice. The voice sounded cracked and dry.
Oakmoss tilted his head wryly, seeming to find humor in the suggestion. “As in entering slavery, so I can serve as cannon-fodder in a war I haven’t got any stake in?” Oakmoss responded. “Couldn’t us dragons just let the humans vanish quietly into extinction? They have suffered enough, Karyu. Prolonging their suffering is cruel.”
Karyu’s heart stung as he and Oakmoss just picked up where they had left off. They had started this conversation many months ago. Every time they had had their meeting, they had merely continued as if without having been interrupted by the intervening month. It was as if no time had elapsed at all. “Based on a narrow interpretation of first-order utilitarianism, one could argue that,” Karyu began, and he proceeded to carry on for a while on that vein.
For many more hours, Karyu and Oakmoss just talked together, their voices weaving around each other like poetry. As they hit their stride, their discourse became true poetry, their voices flowing with alliteration, assonance, and metrical forms. In time, it was if they were singing softly, and if one listened, a chime of music seemed to play, peacefully.
Something really did matter, Karyu realized, besides bringing judgment down on a race of sinners. His preparations to carry out the final Apocalypse of the human race could wait. Perhaps his plans would not cease forever, but there was no need, for now, to rush. After all, demons were immortal, so devouring the human race could wait for as long as a demon could live.