ORIGIN

It was hunger that finally drove him from the river, as is often the way with large carnivores: lazy, resting, recovering, until the stomach took the wheel. His belly rumbled, and he throatily echoed it, an irritated growl hissing from him as he bobbed up in the black water.

Nemean had never come. He'd woken, once, thinking he'd heard her buzzing, a crash, only to find silence, and chalked it up to a dream; other than that, and the occasional visitor slipping to the water to drink, Polaris had remained empty. Raheerah's rampage had left it barren.

There were wounds--deep ones--scored into Dragon's back, ripped through his thick scutes, the pink flesh beneath glistening now and again as he moved. It was healing, but slowly; the real wound was his right hind leg.

A flash of darkness to his right, the shimmer of the firelight blotted out in an instant, the cavern-turned-abattoir suddenly gone. All there was was the dragon, his oblivious tail, unknowing of Dragon's presence as he fell, his dark bulk filling Dragon's vision, searing pain filling his mind.

Dragon blinked the memory away, hissing and shaking his head. Raheerah had half-fallen on Dragon's hind end; his right hind leg had been crushed. The bones had shattered. It was healing, knitting, very slowly; Dragon had been turning magic on it, magic he'd not known he'd even had. He presumed, from the way that it seared with pain, that it was only another kind of fire.

It was still swollen, painful, but he had to eat or he would starve, here.

There was just one thing he wanted to do, first. One thing he would do. Broken leg, or no, he would take Raheerah's place atop the spire just once. He'd let out his own bellowing roar, his own torrential blast of flame, and claim the place. It wasn't a won battle, not to him, until someone had done it.

Then, he would go back to Cetus, back to his swamp, where hunting was easy and food was plentiful. The journey back would be painful, but pain meant little to him.

First, though, he'd give himself one last twist of healing magic, one last fortifying of his wounded leg, before setting out. He turned, closing his eyes, focusing. He could feel the surge of tingling energy: powerful, energetic, hot--every bit like his flames. He had no reason to doubt they were related, and he let out a satisfied huff.

He could feel the wounds mending ever so slightly, the tissue reenergized; could feel the swelling and pain lessen that tiny bit more in his leg.

The alligator looked forward again, with another growl, and began to drag himself up the stony slope and onto the shore.

The alligator hauled himself onto dry land and then lowered himself down onto his belly, resting. The slope was steep, and his wounded leg already hurt.

He shifted one dark eye to the looming Spire, briefly daunted--it was stupid, what he was planning--but his inner defiance flared up, and he huffed a brief plume of smoke. No, he'd get up there. It would be his. But first, he hungered.

The alligator simply rested awhile, allowing his body to adjust to the gravity of land without the buoyancy of water, a buoyancy he'd relied upon for the last few days. Then, when he felt strong enough, he tensed, took a deep breath, and lifted himself up once more.

Each step was pain as the scutes on his back moved, twisting the wounds to and fro. None bled again, but all of them hurt. Worst of all, he couldn't figure out how to not move his hind right leg. Each time he tried to avoid it, his weight fell on it, and he lurched, nearly toppling. Each time, he emitted a hiss of pain, until he had to stop, head bowed so that his weight pressed forward on his chin, to rest.

He repeated this several times, so that the short journey from river to the scarred, scorched center of Polaris took nearly an hour. By the time he got to the middle he was already tiring, and even hungrier than before--but that was why he was here. He lowered his head, sniffing along the burnt stone, the patches of dried blood--and dried dragon's blood. Where Raheerah's blood had fallen, where the stone was scorched the most, he paused.

He closed his eyes, and drew in a deep breath, and called on this new healing magic of his, trying his best to fill himself with the nutrients that lay all around him--in the stone, in the air, in the water that dripped from his form, and most of all in the blackened rock and dried dragon's blood below.

It was not a good meal; it was the first time he had cast the spell, after all. Yet it was a meal. To pull the life glittering and smoldering from dried dragon's blood and the bones of the earth itself was a rush new to the alligator, and he looked up as he finished and inhaled deeply, greatly satisfied with this--though his stomach still ate at him, and his muscles still trembled.

He was stronger than he had been, though--and after a rest, he would prepare to tackle the Spire. The alligator turned his body to face it, lowering himself down again, tail swishing along behind him before settling in an s-shape, Dragon gathering himself for this attempt.

It had taken the alligator another hour to cross the distance between the stony floor and the Spire's base. He'd passed a large black hound, a lynx nearby, and had given them only the briefest of greetings. No, his attention was locked on the blue prize high above. It wasn't greed that sent him, nor a lust for power, but rather a challenging of self: a defiance of his own limitations.

Raheerah could fly, landing neatly at the Spire's summit.

Dragon could never fly--but fuck that guy, one way or another he'd get there. He'd do through sheer grit and determination what others did through innate power--and he'd earn it, where Raheerah simply took it. He'd prove himself every bit as good as the far larger dragon.

The fissures in the ground, the piles of rubble and spikes that jutted here and there, twice made the alligator have to turn back and find another route. And they made his path hard; the going was rough, with him having to put out a great deal of effort just to cross the piles of stone, wincing each time he slid face-first downward or fell belly-first onto a sharp rock.

Eventually, however, he got there.

He gazed up at the spire, and rested awhile longer, breathing slowly and deeply: again, preparing himself. It would be hard, his claws losing purchase, his tail dragging him down. He could see this. He wasn't even sure how far he could get, before he fell--and he knew such a fall would be hard. No, he had to get to the top.

The seconds ticked into minutes ticked into hours, and finally the alligator let out a guttural, hissing roar, and charged into lumbering action. His only advantage was his time spent--days, in fact--learning to scale and climb the cliffs on the walls of Cetus, to get to the light orbs and their prime basking locations.

The alligator limp-ran, one-two-three-falter, one-two-three-stumble, until he hit the first crystal. And then, up he began to go, first hauling his immense bulk up and onto the lower, platform-like smooth stones. It crackled and hissed around him, but the Spire was above, and he would reach it.

The next set of ledges rose smooth and arcing above him, and he roared at them before leaning up, weight on his tail, using it to thrust himself up.

He did it.

Triumph surged through him as he wound up on his belly, the tingling magic in the stone tickling at his scale gem, his tail hanging half off the edge. There were still multiple levels to go, multiple crystals to climb, but for now the alligator paused and rested, glaring up and grinning, sides heaving, as he prepared to tackle the rest.

He rested awhile longer. Inhale, exhale, stare at crystal, body limp and tingling. He let out another rumble, the light in his eyes bright once more. He hadn't had this fire in his eyes since before the fight, since regarding Raheerah's immensity for the first time.

Here was another opponent, another thing to throw himself at, another test for his strength and his fire.

With a growl he looked over the potential paths upward, taking his resting time to plan his way. What he saw would dishearten most: the way would not be easy. The crystals were jagged, some providing not a ledge so much as a trap, something to swallow the unwary Gembound down into its depths. Others were just too steep and too smooth to provide footholds. He could see one way up, but if he slipped, he'd be over the edge before he could act, falling the twenty or so feet to the ground, unless he managed to fall back to this ledge.

He couldn't see what lay around the other side, but he hoped it would be another stair-like ledge. First, though, for this one; he'd do his best to leave himself dangling down onto this ledge, so that if he failed, he merely had to try again.

With another sudden burst of motion (this one slower, more deliberate, more calculated than before) the alligator started forward again. Again it was his muscular tail, rather than his ruined hind leg, that propelled him slowly up the side of the crystal ledge; again he gripped with his forelegs, clawing at the stone, hissing and huffing as he tried to haul himself over its sharp lip.

Up he went, focus all on this, on keeping himself on the edge. He was like a snake, using his tail to thrust himself upward--only to realize that his small forearms weren't enough to guide his bulk, not when they couldn't gain purchase on the smooth gem surface.

When he started to tilt sideways, he realized that he'd never be able to simply fall back. Panic gripped him and he clutched and clawed at the side--and it happened in an instant. One second he was trying to pull himself up, and the next he was falling, tumbling down to the side, spinning in thin air and weightless.

His last, brief thought before the ground was rushing under and around him to slam into his head was a detached, unrelated one, coupled with the briefest burst of exhilaration, of elation. Of wonder.

...I'm flying.

He'd lain this way for hours, twisted on his back, motionless. His breathing was heavy, a faint trickle of blood leaking out one side of his jaw.

It wasn't even clear, at first, whether he was breathing, and his eyes were slitted open in unseeing crescents of gold-glittering black. At length, finally, a faint sound like a cave breeze through a tunnel wheezed from him. Then he was silent, again, for a time.

He certainly didn't wake up at Eve's soft croaking, or whimpering; he remained unconscious, probably injured. If the crow were to look around, well, she wouldn't have to look far to see the probable source of his injury: the spire looming just above.

Either he'd fallen, or it had attacked him somehow.

He was dreaming. He had been, off and on, since the fall; it'd only been a few hours, yet he thought he'd lived lifetimes.

He was a fish in a swamp; he was a dragon. He was flying, soaring in an upside-down blue marsh, his massive wings beating, his neck longer than it could be. His leg ached, but it didn't matter; he was in the air, he could not fall, and he didn't really need to walk. He would hold a vague memory, later, of looking down into open caves that seemed to yawn in a solid rock, as if the world below him was a stone marble pocked with tunnels and holes. He let out a roar, and it echoed, and he felt no fear: he was the king of this world, he was the dragon, he was all-powerful. A plume of fire torrented from his jaws, his long muscular neck twisting to peer down, and he could feel the dragon's horns at the back of his head increase the drag of wind resistance, quite vividly. Then he listened to his roar, listened to it echo over the rock, listened to the reverberation as it built and swelled and came back to him.

It seemed to be speaking.

His own roar, he realized with horror, was turning into the booming voice of the cat-sprite, overwhelming him--filling the air, dragging him down. His wings faltered, the sky falling away, and as he saw the ground rushing toward him again and clawed uselessly at the air, upside-down, the roar became as deafening as the rush of a waterfall.

"nem... nem... Nem... NEM... NEM-NEM-NEM-NEMEEAAAAAAAAN!"

His physical body was on its back, clawed legs moving a little throughout Eve's mimicry--and then he jerked, coming awake as it completed, a loud gasp followed by the clack of jaws in the air like a steel trap snapping shut. In an instant his powerful tail had flipped him onto his stomach--and then he was looking around, wild-eyed and hissing.

Nemean is not here. ......Only Eve. Is this a trick?

The alligator blinked blearily at Eve for a moment, but before he could speak, the pain roared over him in full force. His ribs ached, his back ached, things inside him wrenched with piercing pain. His head felt as if--well, as if he'd fallen headfirst onto hard rock. As he gasped again, more blood dripped from his jaws, and the alligator hissed his disapproval.

".....Ohhh..." he moaned, flinching back down, limp against the stone. "My heaaaaaaad... And here I thought I was flying," he groaned. He assumed, for now, that he'd merely been dreaming... hopefully, Eve was not Nemean in disguise.

Dragon eyed Eve, her words a strange auditory blur in his mind.

Did... it... attack me? He eyed her sidelong, puzzling out what she could possibly mean, trying to think through the agony that wracked his bones and body. At length he turned, ever-so-slightly, to peer back and up at the Spire--then looked at Eve, again.

He couldn't do this--couldn't hold a conversation. Couldn't even think straight. He let out a soft, pained sigh and lowered his head to rest it on the ground, doing his best to call upon that healing energy he'd used before to at least begin to mend the worst of what he'd done to himself.

He felt the warm tingle, and with a wince he realized just how badly-damaged his body was. Breathing hurt; some of his ribs were broken, no doubt. He turned his head again, very slightly, to glare up at the spire.

"...I fell," he finally admitted, at last, with a wheeze. He shut his eyes and lowered his head again, focusing on the energies coursing through his body. He could feel that it was concentrating in his torso, but some was... in his head, as well, physically rather than his mind. He supposed he had landed on it, and on his back, rather hard.

The alligator knew neither the terms nor the meaning, but his lungs had been nicked by the snapped ribs, the concussion leaving him with a swelling in his brain that surely would have been fatal if the crow hadn't awoken him, hadn't led him to healing himself in time.

"Fuck," he spat, at last.