She always fed me.

It’s weird the kind of shit you think about when you’re in... in what really? Shock? Is that what I’m in?

Catatonia, maybe?

...

Is that even a word?

...

Whatever. Whether or not it’s a word, the point remains that it’s weird the kinda shit you think about in situations like these, and the thought that comes to me now is that she always fed me.

Three times a day, sometimes four; she never skipped it.

No matter how much I pissed her off, no matter how difficult I was, she fed me.

And while, yes, this doesn’t change the fact that she was objectively a terrible mother, by human standards at least, as I stare at her cooling corpse laying in a pool of her glittering, golden blood, I’m willing to admit that it counts for something.

Well, it counted for something.

I stare at the dead dragon’s corpse for a long while, long enough in fact that it’s several minutes before I realise that the forest has stopped burning.

The fire has gone out utterly. And when I say utterly, I mean utterly; no smoke, no smoulder, just lots of ash and the burnt out husks of once powerful trees.

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Okay, that’s very fucking weird, but I’ll take it.

Rather weird than a forest fire. Those things are fucking awful.

With an exhale, I rise, then shiver in disgust when I realise that, sitting next to dragon mama like I have all this time, her blood has flowed around and all over the parts of me touching the ground.

How the fuck had I not noticed this?

‘Ugh! I need a swim,’ I mutter, then turn to head for the river, only to stumble to a stop when I come across a woman’s head with half the torso still attached.

Right, spear chick.

She looks Chinese, young too, probably not even twenty-five, and her face is permanently frozen in an expression of surprise, like she’d actually expected jumping at a dragon’s mouth to end any other way than with her death.

Why had they attacked us? I wonder. What the fuck did we ever do to them that made them willing to take on a fucking dragon?

I see both of spear chick’s legs and the rest of her torso nearby, all in separate pieces, and the ground has splotches of red from her blood in the few places where dragon mama’s own golden, more voluminous one hasn’t spread.

I can smell it, her blood; dragon mama’s too, now that I bother to pay attention to it.

Spear chick’s blood is fainter, iron-y, while dragon mama’s has this indescribable fiery tang to it that once noticed cannot be unnoticed.

It’s everywhere, cloying, clinging, seeming to suffocate me like a wave and I rush to the water, hoping that submerging myself in it would make the fucking smell go away, but when I reach the water there’s a surprise waiting; it’s turned gold.

Mom’s blood has beat me here.

I step back from the river, then pick a direction at random (right; also downstream, coincidentally) and just begin to walk.

I’m not very fast on my feet, but that’s okay, I’m not in a rush.

One foot in front of the other, one wing in front of the other, slowly, steadily, I walk forward until the water inevitably turns clear again, then I dive in and swim forward without ever looking back.