The house lay in solitude and silence. The insides were changed, such that everything seemed out of place to me. Stains of several colors rested proudly upon the table, the walls, and the rugs that had invaded the floor. The jasmine plants had grown wider, such that they seemed to erupt out of their pots. And over the table, the skeleton of stems that used to belong to a cluster of grapes waited for me, most of its fruits already fleeced away. All but one, gone.

I plucked the sole grape, and I held it between my fingers, under a ray of the sun that had slip in through the window, past the drapes to grace my lone grape.

I rolled it over the table as a delicate dice. I once had placed dice with Dariel, one day where there was nothing relevant to do in the workshop. The fruit’s hue reminded me of the scales that dressed Mardhaka’s neck. And the grape, it was closer to a dragon scale than to me. Both the grape and Mardhaka’s skin were real. I wondered if grapes had dreams. Plants, in general. Were they able to sleep, even? They don’t move appreciably; they have no eyes to betray the onset of unconsciousness. No, I wouldn’t trust a grape to dream.

I didn’t register the creaking of the door hinges, nor the little steps that preceded it. When the sunlight washed upon my face, I found two scared faces staring at me. A little girl that wore Orphela’s facial features with naïveté, and her mother, a distorted Orphela, a changed Orphela.

The mother rushed to the table, carefully slipping by her child’s side. She slammed her hands on the table.

“Am I dreaming? Answer, cruel fate!”

“No, but Cirruin is. Long time no see, Orphela dear. Are you planning to hibernate?”

The disgust on her face betrayed the fact that she was realizing me to be real. Then, for a second, a smile alighted. And just as soon as it appeared, it faded to give place to a frown.

“Mommy, who is the weird man?” the child said, pulling on Orphela’s yellow sundress.

“An old friend of your father, Sihea. His name is Terus and he is not welcome here.”

I didn’t understand why Orphela was scowling at me. I left the grape on the bowl and joined my hands over the table.

“You are changed, Orphela. And fat. Why are you changed, and why are you fat?”

She gritted her teeth and groaned. “Someone was supposed to be long dead, and I got severely depressed. Now I know you are alive. Walk out the door, and don’t set a foot back into this house ever again. Pretty please.”

I sat up and began walking towards the door. I didn’t understand her reasons, but a dragon ought to honor the lairs of those he respects.

“Wait! You mor...sel! You are not supposed to obey me when I tell you these things.”

I shifted, bewildered. Little Sihea yelped and hid behind her mother.

“There, love, Uncle Terus moves like that. He is a wizard.”

“Bizzard?” She asked, eyes big and curious.

“A man who does magic.”

“Like a faidy goomoder?”

Orphela tousled the girl’s hair. “Something like that. Now go to the room a wee while, love, I need to talk about adult things with uncle Terus.”

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“But I want to see him do bizzard things.”

I shifted away to crouch in front of the girl. “Like this?”

Sihea clapped her little hands, which wasn’t the reaction I expected. “This one is brave, Orphela, I shall grant you that. Now, little one, obey your mom.”

She shook her head up and down effusively, her brown hairs ebbing and flowing. Then, she ran away and into the room.

“She has her dolls in there.” Orphela said, as if she needed to excuse a child’s behavior. “Now, can you follow me to the yard? We got a lot to talk about.”

I tailed her through the back door, and I was met with a massive mound of long hairs. A black mop wagging his fluffy tail.

“This is our family dog, Dusk. Dariel named him and wanted him to guard the house but, as you can see, dear Terus, Dusk is a man’s weight worth of harmlessness.”

I patted dusk on the head, and a pink tongue peeked out of the mass of threads. “Interesting creature you two acquired.”

“He likes you. He likes everyone. If a robbery happened tomorrow, he would open the door for the scoundrels and fix them some hot tea.”

I resisted the urge to ask if that was a truth or an embellishment of reality for dramatic emphasis.

She led me to a little forged table, painted white, placed solemnly about the flowerpots. We didn’t sit at it, she just placed the basket with groceries on it and gave a sigh of relief.

Crossing her arms, and unlike Dusk, she barked “Why did you return, Terus?”

“Because I am and you are my friends. Do I need a further reason?”

“You cannot do this to us! Where goes all the suffering, all the grief? What are my tears worth if you just appear as if nothing has happened? You deprecate my pain, idiot.”

Lowering my head, I considered what to say for a moment. “I have visited Dariel already. I know I was away for four years. This is but a statement of facts, and no excuse. But I cannot fight against my ontological make-up. I was stripped from the world for all of this time, and the first thing I did when I recovered control over my being was visit Dariel. And then you. Please, Orphela, blame me for anything except for that which I cannot change.”

She placed a bulging finger upon my chest, and I slapped her hand away with the backside of mine. “Your hands are changed, and not only in appearance. I see hostility in them now, dear Orphela.”

“You bear no small part of the guilt for my weight gain! I found solace for your loss in Dariel’s arms, in the moments of sleep, and in food. In food, Terus! You made me like this and now, the storm gone and weathered by us alone, you mock me.” she sniffed as she spoke. Hers eyes began to irritate and tears to gather on them and fall down her swollen cheeks.

“I fail to understand the exact nature of your pain, and it’s shameful. You cannot blame things for their nature, Orphela. You don’t place the blame on a pigeon for dropping excrements upon one’s head, or a cow for eating a meadow’s flowers. Calling me a victimizer when—and pray correct me were I to be wrong—you managed to make a victim out of yourself won’t solve anything. Yours seems to be the sole hand that holds the knife and stabs your chest.”

She began walking circles around the table.

“Curse, you Terus.” She grabbed an apple from the basket and cast it against my head with all her might. I avoided a fall by shifting to a stable position after losing my footing from both impact and surprise. “Curse you, waking nightmare!” She broke in an ugly cry. “You have no right to make me feel like this.”

Orphela was a fantastic teacher, even when the lesson she wanted to teach was that words could scald men like a dragon’s boiling saliva.

What could I do? A dragon would ignore or kill her if she managed to become unable to be ignored. But I was Terus: after four years of inexistence, I had risen from the clouds of dreams anew. It was not fair for her to put the blame for the dreamer’s actions on me. It was not just, even, if I granted justice some sort of wishful holy power over both men and dragons.

She yelled at me, sputtering little drops of saliva as she exiled me from her home. Go away, leave me alone, you are not welcome here, go away, leave us alone, never come back, get out of our home. I wasn’t going to apologize, not this time. Friend or not, Orphela was behaving incorrectly, and I was in no position to force her to correct her behavior. Learning to deal with this situation was valuable for my understanding of mankind.

“Orphela, how old are you?” I asked, which stopped her on her tracks.

“Excuse me?”

“Age. How many years have spanned since your birth?”

“Twenty and four. If your curiosity is sated, please, leave.” She was crying as she said this. As if it pained her to maltreat me.

“Amazing, Orphela friend, I was made before you were born, yet I think you have lived more time, in total. Can I tell you to respect your elders, even?” I smiled, and that made her contort her face in disgust.

“Get out!”

She threw a lemon at me, and I shifted through the fruit to avoid another painful hit. “Goodbye Orphela, be good, be kind,” I said as I tousled her hair, and then, willed myself way from her home, away from Zenvo.