ORIGIN

By the time he reached Cetus, his breath was coming in massive, ragged gasps and he felt as though, somehow, Raheerah had still managed to set his insides on fire. His legs wobbled as he splashed into the swamp, and he stumbled, but his jaws held tight to the gemstones gripped in his teeth, and his eyes stayed up, steadily staring toward his goal.

Black floundered onward, through the cold of the marsh and the thick mist, deeper and deeper into Cetus. He slowed, but not by choice--he kept staggering sideways or down in the mud, hitting holes and roots that lay unseen beneath the water. But that--that was why he'd come here. Cetus could let a Gembound lie, unseen: hidden in the roots of the trees, shrouded by the thick mists. Assuming Raheerah didn't simply burn that away. But he'd hidden here before, he'd guarded a chrysalis here before, and it was the most likely place that he could think of.

He chose a spot nearish the Heart--the better to keep wet against flames--but thick in the tangled roots of the trees that rose near its edge. Into these he clambered, nosing around until he found a place dry enough, and there--exhausted--he dropped down. Mud-slicked and gasping, he lay there and tried not to just drift off into an immediate, desperate sleep.

No: he had work to do before he rested. He'd failed once already, and these stones attested to that. They were all that remained of Raheerah's victims. Black could not bring them back. But he could offer them some form of rebirth.

It was, still, only an echo of what they had been: a bone left over, in a sense, from a life cut short.

Black leaned down, trembling with exhaustion, pressing his nose to the first--to the fused stone, a white-flecked black that had horrifically twisted and melted around the small pink gemstone of the bird. His magicka gently flared out, and he closed his eyes, concentrating.

Live, he thought, and as his magic took root, as the stone began to grow and fuse with what lay beneath, he turned his attention to the other one. This one was black, flecked with white. He didn't know how the melded stone of the first would react to having been fused, so, but there were threads of pink growing healthily with the dark.

Black looked around. He was hidden wholly beneath the roots; he'd had to crouch-walk to crawl in. Nobody would think to look here. They would be safe, together--and he would guard them.

He pressed his nose to the second stone.

He would guard them. But there was only so much he could do. He could not fight Raheerah. He could not even survive him, should the dragon choose to kill him. He wasn't sure what miracle had allowed him to survive this far. The memory of the whisper of the lamb beside him--the lamb he'd told to flee, the lamb he'd assured he would distract a dragon for--gripped him again as it had the first time, like cold fingers around his stone heart. Grief twisted, and he whimpered softly as he nudged the rock.

As his magicka flared out again, the hound held quite still.

He remembered the lamb, lying beside him. He remembered feeling helpless to help it against its wounds. Where had it even come from?

Another soft whine escaped him. Loss grew stronger--the loss of a Gembound he had never really known.

His eyes opened. The obsidian was taking root, now, too--and he pulled back to give it room, and stared at them. At the symbols of two deaths, mindless deaths, pointless deaths. Two losses of life, one a mere child.

A third whine, gripped deeply with sorrow, rose into a hoarse, despairing howl: a howl filled with tears, a howl that held all Black's grief and regret and guilt for that moment.

It wasn't that he blamed himself. It was just that there was no way to undo it. There was no way to fix it.

His howling went on, and on, his crying muffled by the mist, until he eventually drifted off, and fell miserably asleep.