ORIGIN

It had taken him a few days to finish eating her.

The dingo's body had laid limp in the water, seized in his jaws, while he lay quiet and absent in the black water of the swamp. Sometimes he stashed her beneath a rock, letting the fish nibble and waiting for the body to soften enough to tear apart. Other times he lay with its matted fur between his teeth, a grotesque silhouette against the surface of the marsh.

When it was time--when its rigidity had faded and it was bloating, soft--he gripped pieces in his maw and clamped down, and spun. Over and over in the water, a roiling torrent like a spinning log, his prey's limbs tearing away. He gulped them down.

But when he reached her neck, when he bit down there, he found an unpleasant surprise: something not only hard but spiked, biting into the roof of his mouth. He tasted blood--blood that was fresh, his own. For a time he pulled back and tilted his head to and fro, quietly eyeing the gem. It was a part of her neck, it seemed--but a spiky part, not a normal part. A strange part.

The alligator floated the prey's remains to the shore, where he pinned her there with his forelimbs, and tore until all that was left was the bit of stringly flesh and bone with the gem attached.

Then he took it, and he carried this in his jaws--well-fed, content, and now curious--onto the land.

As always, his body felt crushingly heavier without the water to support his bulk. More and more he simply lazed in the swamp, never wandering about on land.

But now--this was important. He was not sure if Czernobog still remained in Cetus--indeed he'd not seen any of the others in some time--but the boar was the babysitter, the nurturer, despite Dragon's expectations that he would have been a killer.

He did not, however, find him. The nesting ground the boar had used to raise Imp and Merrow lay empty. Tal'at and Willow were nowhere to be found.

With a soft grunt the alligator turned, and began to dig his webbed claws into the muck. He would build his own nest, then, and plant this seed, and make it his own. If the boar returned, he would leave the parenting to him. Aquarian only knew that Czernobog was a better parent than Dragon himself.

The piece of flesh and bone and gem lay soon enough in a little hollow in the mud. It smelled rank and meaty, like rot and bone and food. Whatever this creature was, Dragon had learned how to impart a bit of himself into a gem. And all else aside, the prey's inner fire had been admirable to him.

Perhaps with his own strength, it could be reborn as something better. Something-... more powerful. A Child of Rot, rather literally. He eyed over the scrap of carcass attached to the stone, and lowered his snout to press it against the carnelian spikes, focusing.

Flame. Life. Fire. Rot. Darkness. Death.

He could feel the heat build within his gullet, the flare of life coursing through him, and he focused it: pressing it, in this unfamiliar way--a magic he had only ever cast once--into the gem before him. It was difficult--and the end result was faint. But it was there. The gem shimmered with faint new life--with fire.

"Grow," the massive alligator rumbled. He began to nudge dirt and mud to lightly cover the scraps of meat and bone and gem. "Grow, and rise. Fire from rot. Life from death. Become."

Then he dragged his massive bulk alongside the new nest. He had eaten well--feasted upon this creature-that-was--and now he would wait, guarding what it was to become. Something born new, something fresh.

Something of fire, and rot.