She’d drifted off without going inside to bed. She gradually became aware of someone standing over her. Was it Mayrin, with a stronger insistence that she head back inside where her family awaited?
She looked up and eyed her father, who stared down at her.
“It didn’t matter how many times I went back there, father.” She explained when she recognized him. “I killed and I killed and I killed, but there were always more of them than I had arrows.” She blinked and refocused her gaze. Exhaustion was digging deep into her, and if she wasn’t careful, she’d fall asleep on the spot. “If you had to ask for my opinion, that’s where they’re nested. That’s where they come from. That’s where they’ve always come from.”
“What, Sheilah?” He asked curiously.
“Gnolls.” She replied simply. “I went there with as many arrows as I could carry four times, and there were always more of them than I had arrows.” She rolled on her side as her need for sleep crawled inside her head and insisted itself with a bone-cracking yawn. “There was the one with the strange power, too. Always there, always waiting. It didn’t matter how many arrows I put through it, it tore them out and kept laughing.”
He squatted next to her. “Where?” He asked.
“The Keep.” She replied. “If you want to drive them from the Redstone once and for all, you’ll have to go there.” She explained in a quiet, broken voice. “But there’s one you can’t ever kill. It refuses to die.”
Her father brought her into the tent and sent her to bed, a bed that felt strange after so long apart from it.
She tossed and turned, struggling to fall asleep even as her body demanded sleep. She couldn’t settle down. It was strange, but the somewhat soft, comfortable bedroll felt alien to her.
She curled up into a ball, imagined the naked stars that flickered down over the Redstone, and after a while, laying there, breathing slowly, she felt herself relax, bit by bit. She drifted alone in her mind, trying to put pieces together. There were parts of her memories that were simply gone.
What had happened in those times? What happened to her as she rambled all over the Redstone, killing dragonlings and eating their flesh? She poked and prodded her memory, but there wasn’t anything that grounded her, nothing that made sense.
As she struggled to recall things that she couldn’t remember, she gradually realized that there was a part of her that felt... different from her. It existed within, parallel to her, but not her at all. It dreamed of flames and violence, subjugation and fury, and an overwhelming, insatiable hunger.
That was it. That part of her was the Dragon, wasn’t it? It was the part of her that constantly demanded acknowledgement. It was the part that hid behind her eyes and consumed her food as fast as she could eat it.
Her father said she needed to learn to control it.
Totems were more than just powerful beasts. They were living representations of strength and power and interminable wisdom that defied comprehension. They were creatures of power and majesty in their own way, each at the pinnacle of their respective histories.
But above them all was the Dragon. Immortal. Indestructible. Demanding obeisance, bringing destruction and leaving ashes and terror in its wake.
Her eyelids glowed subtly as the eyes beneath them slipped back and forth in sleep as the dragon within her reached out to her as she slept, filling her mind with dreams of limitless flames and endless subjugation.
She dreamed of the Supreme Tyrant again, massive eyes as large as she was tall, brilliant orbs of molten gold, rows of teeth so large she likely wouldn’t even feel them as she was swallowed whole.
Its massive brain was awake and asleep at the same time, thinking and dreaming strange, alien thoughts as it rejected everything that was not itself.
One thought focused itself on her, and Sheilah buckled to her knees, the Supreme Tyrant’s power of Supremacy focused exclusively on her.
The pressure of the Supreme Tyrant, the Dragon of Dragons, that behemoth that defied everything, rejected everything, demanded everything abase itself beneath its overwhelming might was a palpable intimidation that crushed her beneath its weight. The air was squeezed from her lungs, the marrow from her bones, the blood from her pores.
In a moment she would awaken in her bed, slick with sweat and shame, in a moment she would be safe, in a moment she would feel the shame and crushing loss of her sister as her mind rewound itself and replayed the fight with the gnolls, over and over again.
In a moment, it would all be over.
But first, her own power, the feebly fluttering spark of defiance, the power of the Dragon that had grown within her as she fed on dragonlings during her long, wandering journey across the Redstone demanded she answer power to power, defiance to defiance, power for power. She would face this thing, this Supreme Tyrant on her feet. She could do that much, at least.
Sheilah forced herself to her feet as the titanic creature shifted itself in the massive caldera, blackened wings unfurling. If the Mother Tyrant ever deigned to take flight, those wings that defied words for size would darken the skies and blot out the sun for miles in every direction.
One of the titanic eyes opened and shifted to look in her direction, pupil narrowing as it focused on her. If it was a gap between two stone cliffs, she could have fit in the slit pupil.
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I see you.
The cold shock, the icewater in her veins, the terror of being seen, of being recognized by that thing, that indescribable, godlike thing that demanded everything, destroyed everything, and defied everything, was too much; her heart burst in her chest and she awoke in her bed with a gasp.
She wasn’t just soaked in sweat, her entire bed seemed soggy with it. She struggled out of her bed, feeling disgust and revulsion. She struggled out of her drenched night clothes and tossed them to the side where they lay in a rank, wet heap.
She was weak and desperately hungry. She wobbled on her feet and collapsed to the rugs that covered the flooring of the tent.
Her head floated dizzily, and seemed impossibly heavy, too heavy to lift. Her legs were too weak to support her; she crashed to her knees. Her body boiled with heat; she was freezing. She was unrelentingly hungry, she felt like puking up everything she’d eaten since she was born.
She struggled to move to the central fire. There would be a bucket there, she could drink from it and wash herself.
It wasn’t far.
In just a moment, she would make it.
She could reach it with her hands if she tried.
“Mayrin, see to her bedding.” A voice, distorted and strange, slipped into her head. “Sellia and Kellia, help your mother.”
Her head lolled powerlessly on her neck as she was rolled over onto her back. Her vision was strange, and it was an impossible struggle to focus on anything, so she gave up.
“We need to get some food into her.”
“She’s covered in sweat; we need to get some water into her, husband-”
“Broth will be fine for her right now.”
Something was placed to her lips, which felt like numb bits of shredded leather.
She drifted between waking and unconsciousness.
People spoke to her, or maybe she spoke to them.
She felt herself being washed, but felt powerless to move, to hinder or help.
“Breathe.” someone told her, but she couldn’t remember how, and it was a bother anyways, so she decided not to do it.
It didn’t matter, so she slipped back into sleep.
She opened her eyes an eternity later and discovered that aside from some lingering exhaustion, she felt a lot better. She stared up at the inner lining of the tent she’d been born and grew up in and waited for her mind to come back to her.
Something had happened to her, right?
One of the Mother Tyrant’s eyes snapped open, the nictitating membrane flicking to the side. Its massive iris shifting between the myriad colors of molten gold and flame. Suddenly, without warning or preamble, the iris tightened, the slit pupil of the dragon constricting as it focused on her.
I see you.
Sheilah’s heart clamped painfully in her chest as she remembered. She struggled to breathe, the muscles in her chest like taught iron bands.
Eventually, reluctantly, they loosened and she was able to take a gasping breath. Once she did that, her heart seemed to relax and slow down in her chest, though she seriously believed that if she tried thinking about it again, that overwhelming sense of terror would slam into her again and rip her to shreds from the inside out.
She blinked a few times, and eventually, she felt like she was able to move.
She tried moving her fingers which seemed to work. She moved her arms a little, and suddenly realized that there was someone else in her bed. She turned her head and saw Sellia was to her left. She turned her head and was unsurprised to see Kellia on the right.
She tried to move her arms again, and despaired at the fact that they seemed to feel as if they weighed fifty pounds.
She couldn’t get out of bed without waking her sisters, but she had a more pressing need; she needed to relieve herself.
She struggled out of bed and was dismayed to see that she was scrawny, scarcely a bundle of sticks in a wrapping of skin.
She maneuvered herself over the pot used for such things and eyed her sisters, who had migrated across the space she’d once occupied to embrace each other. Whoever was decided to be their husband would have problems keeping them apart from each other. She was absolutely certain that they would never settle to marry separate men.
She struggled into her clothing, despairing over how laborious it was. When the time came, would she be able to draw her bow?
“So you can move around, now.” She heard her father call out.
“Barely” she tried to reply, but it came out in a ragged croak, instead.
“Come on in here and try and eat something.” He offered, and after the fight with her clothes ended in a victory for her, she wobbled and stumbled her way into the main room of the tent and let gravity pull her down by the central fire.
He eyed her cautiously. “Feel like telling me what happened?” He asked simply.
What happened? She didn’t want to remember. That molten eye, that throaty acknowledgement.
She took a breath and tried to find a way to begin without that monstrous terror crushing her under its weight.
“I dreamed of the Tyrant.” She managed in a strangled voice.
He passed her a bowl of porridge and rubbed his chin in thought. “You’ve dreamed of the Tyrant before.” He replied.
“She saw me.” She managed around a mouthful of food. He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing as she ate.
When she finished a few bites, she settled the bowl in her lap.
“She saw me. She recognized me. She spoke to me.” She added, and he gestured at the bowl in her lap. She obediently ate some more.
“Keep eating. You’re going to eat a lot more in the immediate future. Expect to be eating while doing your chores.”
She blinked at him. “Chores?”
“You think I’m going to let someone lay about when there’s chores to be done? We’ve all got responsibilities, and yours just got larger by two: You’re to eat as much as you can and recover what you’ve lost as quickly as you can.”
She shot him an unhappy look, which earned her a laugh.
“You live and die by your own strength.” He replied simply.