Mardhaka’s lair lay in sepulchral motionlessness. Illusion had abandoned it like an ashen deer a thicket ablaze. The barren entrance laid exposed for any good observer to see. Climbing into it, I was met with a show of layered cobwebs. Old, opaque, dirty cobwebs. Cobwebs as devoid of a dweller as the tunnels that my maker’s daughter once made.

The air, stagnant. The ambient, humid. The tunnels, left behind as they were, still had Mardhaka’s harsh personality imprinted on them. Maybe in the same way naturalists could recognize the burrows of certain marine animals in rocks formed in the seas of yore, a maker always left an imperfect reflection on their work. A lizard in their lair, a man in his home, a spider in her web. A dreamer in his dreams. Maybe I betrayed part of Cirruin’s nature, and the fake flowers that one day rained over Zenvo revealed mine.

Fake, I dare call flowers as real as I… fake. How silly of you, Terus the dragon’s dream.

Climbing through the tunnels, I was met with some collapsed pathways, with abandoned feathers that refused to decay, with several piles of ancient riches that were worthless to Mardhaka.

Reaching a chamber that sloped downwards, as if it were a pouch carved in the stone, I curled on the deepest corner and lay there, alone with myself. Mardhaka was gone, who knew where. Who could I speak with now?

I could lose time, for time was already lost and wouldn’t afford me the kindness of returning. There, still as a dream waits, not even breathing, I contemplated what I had made of my existence. Urgency and desperation swelled inside me like they had never done before.

“How unbecoming of a dragon. Pathetic, aren’t we?” words like shattered glass reached me.

I opened my eyes to find the yellow hue of Cirruin in front of me.

“I salute you, avatar of the dreamer,” I said, still sitting like a forgotten ragdoll.

The fellow dream approached and examined me with a single eye, a single slit pupil surrounded by an iris of magma and coal. “A mind-cancer ill-begotten by humanity, yet so intriguing. What a curious defective figment of my mind you are, Terus.”

“You manifested here to mock me, maker?”

“Nothing like that, my self-developing work of art. You needed a dragon to talk with today, and my daughter has run off with the ravens. Speak to me, Terus. Tell me all that I already know, so I may hear it from your mouth whose every detail I have come up with. Indulge your master, Terus.”

“You chastised me, taxed four years from the existence of things I came to love. Why should I not despise you, Cirruin?”

His nostrils expanded and I braced for a mouthful of fire that never came.

“Because you are I. Substrata of my soul, fledgling so suppressed, how marvelous it is to see you face to face. To behold my creation as he, as I, behold my creation. I have committed no mistakes with your face, every time you decide to breath, your ribcage moves as it had moved on the man I loved so long ago. Terus, yours are the name and the face of the only human I ever cared for,” he sounded agitated, dejected, “Terus, I cannot stand you tarnishing his image any further. I cannot forget him, and I cannot stop dreaming you forevermore. You made flowers rain upon them like I made ash and brimstone rain upon him. Do you want the burdening memories that I denied to you all this time, Terus?”

“Are they blessing, or curse, Cirruin?”

“I have never known of a memory that’s the former, my work of art.”

I stood, and placed a hand upon Cirruin’s scaly snout. From his eyes, I could see myself caressing him, and from my eyes, he could see himself being revered by me.

Searching his eyes, I found no genuine compassion nor complaints about what he knew was my choice. Only disappointment, or, maybe, the kind of pity one reserves for the cockroaches one is about to kill.

A pang of uncertainty coursed through both of us. Uncertainty to see, uncertainty to reveal. Yet there was no alternative path. I had no true need for the memories, as men have no need for light. Yet, friend, do you live in darkness? Amidst the death of the night, don’t you yearn for a candle? Even when the monsters lurking in the shade are long gone and forgotten, isn’t light your first choice? Still, both sun and candle can sear your skin, even if you are careful. Fire, light begetter, doesn’t care about who it may burn. Memory is then just a flame, the one that learned to be slightly less than lethal.

“Grant it to me, Cirruin. Unleash this torment I so strongly lust for.”

“Remember what you weren’t allowed until now, part of mine. Remember, and scream as much as you’d like.”

Like a flood breaking through the course of a dried-out river it came back to me. Terus, in flesh and bone, taking care of a young, injured Cirruin. Terus, the man cursed with a lengthened lifespan by a dragon that hated him deeply for siding with his rival in a dispute that should have concerned no human. Terus, whose sword saved young Cirruin from dying in the claws of his elder and brother. Terus, who held his wife in arms as she died, and held his son and daughters in arms as they, paradoxically older than him, died; and who placed flowers before the gravestones of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Terus, who abandoned Ludlun and climbed up the mountain, back when Cirruin still respected the town, when he acted more as a sole guardian that sometimes came down and asked for a little payment for the services rendered. Terus, who entered Cirruin’s lair barehanded, his sword still sheathed and intended to remain like that unless he found wolves or a bear instead of the dragon, Terus, who presented himself before my maker with two simple words: “Remember me?”.

“I do,” Cirruin answered, both in the memory and before me. “How could I forget the one I owe my life to.”

He had come pushed by the childish hope of striking a friendship unlike most. If Terus was bound to live until the day he who cursed him would have died had he not been felled by this little corrupted knight that dared help a dragon, then only in another of that kind he could find a friend.

“I see everyone wither and perish, their life draining between my unchanging fingers, away, always away. Not one I can save, not one. But there is no need to save you, dragon. Like a man you speak, like a man you express gratitude. I came to call in the favor you owe me, yet I ask you not to in turn save my life someday. For what would I wish for more, than to die? No. Cirruin, Ludlun’s benevolent tyrant, I come to you asking for your company alone. When men and women fade from everywhere but my dreams and memories, you persist, fair lizard. Cirruin, only real being in a world of mirages, repay my kindness in companionship, please!” Terus had said before bowing in front of Cirruin until his long, tattered mane touched the cave’s floor.

The then-young Cirruin approached the forever-young man and pushed him up with his snout. “Stand proud, esteemed knight, my kin heeds not the plea of weaklings. You have earned the right to walk into my lair unimpeded, you have earned the right to speak to me safely. I cannot give you the friendship you ask for: you have already taken it, without asking, the day your sword met Caldireo’s heart to steal his beats and gift them to mine. Should you live as long as a dragon, may you as well live along a dragon.”

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From there onwards their friendship bloomed, and it spanned centuries. To make it justice on the paper would need the leaves of a library whole, and letters so minuscule no man would be able to read it lest he had a magnifying glass. It’s not my intention to, then, picture the adoration they fostered for each other. Every caress, every trip by the creek, every night eating fish by the fire, there is no denying they are perfectly engraved into Cirruin’s mind. Every little bit of humanity Terus freely gave to Cirruin, and every bit of dragoness Cirruin slyly traded back, all registered in the days the dreamer yearns for. I am but a testament of this bond, of this burning wish of an old dragon.

Cirruin’s dream avatar was crying: as the memories unfurled, his expression grew more miserable. He was trying so hard to look tough even when remembering how, after several hundred years of companionship, he woke up before Terus did one day. And the following words are not mine, but Cirruin’s, if that distinction makes sense at all: He slept as if he had invented slumber: peacefully, delicately, with an illusion of rough beauty that only went away when I noticed his absolute lack of breath.

Cirruin pronged his friend gently with his snout as he lay of the straw bed he had made inside the cave.

“Wake up, Terus, you hopeless slob, I want to go hunting,” Cirruin said before he began shaking the body with his claws. “Open those eyes, son of man!”

For an hour on end Cirruin poked the body and pleaded his case. “Terus, friend of mine, cough, sneeze, or whine, please. This joke has gone too far. Hide your heartbeat no more.”

Come the second hour, and as the color left his friends lips, my maker curled around the body and whimpered softly. “Terus, son of man, you are now with the ones that drained between your fingers. May we meet again in a few millennia, if fates are so kind. Farewell.”

For another hour he cradled the cadaver before, at last, enveloping it on the bedsheets Terus wore to keep warm on winter nights, and flying to Ludlun.

He landed upon the roof of the tallest tower in the town, and from there he let out a proclamation in the tongue of Ludlunians, “Ludlun, your oldest son has finally parted. Let his funeral be the most respectful the city has ever seen, and, please, allow this dragon to partake in it.”

He descended and gently placed the body in the middle of the main street of the town before returning to the tower. Around the corpse people gathered. Cirruin idly heard the words of the ungrateful, of the disrespectful.

“It’s the mountain’s hermit, I thought he was immortal,” murmured a woman.

“He dealt with the oppressor dragon for this boon of longevity. It serves him well to be finally sent on a trip to the underworld,” said an old man.

“The dragon is looking at us,” observed a third pedestrian.

“Bury my friend as he deserves, Ludlun. Give him the grave you would your father or mother. I ask not for anything fit for a king, and I am willing to pay in treasures if you insist it needs to be done. All the gold and precious stones stashed in my cave cannot make his heart beat within his chest, not even once more.”

“What’s your plan, dragon?” Asked a gallant knight, a diluted Terus, probably one of his descendants. “You monsters have no heart.”

“I plan for my drearest friend to have a wake in the way he wished for. He once told me he wanted to rest among men, for in death he would finally be your equal again. I pray thee, people of Ludlun, organize a funeral for my friend.”

Sipping on a beer, Remelias approached the body and placed a dirty boot over it. “We had a deal that you would not ask us for nothing more, a deal you had struck with this supposed friend of yours, and he with us. Inspecting the body of your friend could bring us closer to understanding his condition, there is no damned way we are letting the worms feast on it. think about it, Cirruin, dear benefactor: you could have another friend very soon.”

Cirruin showed his teeth. These people. These people hadn’t seen what he was capable of doing. They had grown complacent, they thought of Cirruin as they did of a big drooling dog. He had accepted abuses by the townsfolk in the past, and, under the wise and calming gaze of Terus, let them slip. Generations of men and women had only been exposed to the pacified side of Cirruin, growing boastful, forgetting their place in the natural order.

For Terus, Cirruin had forgiven their transgressions. For Terus, whose anger would be stoked by any reprisal enacted by the dragon he held so dear. For Terus, whose disappointed stare burned more than any word, pierced deeper than any arrow. For Terus, that couldn’t get angry or disappointed anymore.

“Last chance, Ludlun, bury him or run to the most barren of hills, where fire cannot climb after you and drag your souls down to the hell you would deserve if you don’t give him a funeral fit for the good man he was.”

“No, go away, we will give you a candlestick made of gold or something equivalent later,” The knight said as he approached the body to examine it closely.

They were dismissing him, and disrespecting Terus’ last wish. Cirruin cried in the tongue of our kin. “I am sorry, friend of mine. May your blessed bloodline be perpetuated by the ones that migrated prior to the worst of days, this one. All others, fuel for your hallowed flame.”

Fire burned inside Cirruin. It boiled, building pressure inside his throat and nostrils. Pyres were common among human death rites, so why couldn’t he give his friend the funeral it deserved, personally, and with a pyre fit not for a king, but for the emperor of the universe?

In a second, wings beat, tearing the skies and the dam in the back of Cirruin’s mouth crumbled down, letting the blazing rain loose upon the city. The citizens ran, but no man was ever faster than the hungering flames. They bathed in them, like I, the dream, did so many times. They met the fire with screams and curses and cries for mercy, but Cirruin wouldn’t close his mouth, wouldn’t spare a single soul. Their ashes would mix with Terus’; they would attend his funeral, like it or not. They would be his funeral.

After a day of raining punishment over the town, exhausted and miserable, Cirruin flew back to the mountain, and, resting upon a ridge denuded of vegetation, he observed the new landscape. Ludlun was gone, embers and charred corpses its only remnants. Ludlun was gone just like Terus, and now, Cirruin was alone.

He clambered up to the cave, made its way to the hoard room, and collapsed. His legs were still strong enough to hold his weight while standing, but he lacked the will. Only yesterday he had been happy. Now he had murdered all the people down in the valley to cremate his best friend’s body.

Soon he learned grief was not a stab, it was not a cut from a rusty metal. It was the perpetual pains that came with age, a cavity in a tooth you cannot pluck out, the daily migraines, the loss of eyesight you don’t notice until it becomes a problem, a displaced hip. A wound that would not heal nor would one get used to it.

For days on end, what Cirruin did can only be described as suffering. With his body spread on the ground, his legs jerking in spasmodic fashion every few minutes, the dragon cried his soul out in this sorry state nobody else saw.

After what felt like an eternity of torment, Cirruin came out of the cave and, from the ridge, watched the remains of Ludlun under the rain, as the water washed away the ashes and mixed them with the ground underneath

“You finally return to whence you came from, Terus. I hope I dream with you sometime.” he said, retreating back to the cave, exhausted in equal parts from the depression and from lack of sleep.

Only in dreams he would see Terus, but this would not be the Terus he loved, this would be a Terus of dreams, a bad caricature to satisfy the baser need, to make him content with my mere presence. And then, when he realized he was dreaming, that Terus was truly dead, he would ransack the dreamed Ludlun and destroy it, rekindling the funeral pyre, if only with dreamed fire. The man whose face I don has no marked grave, because the Ludlun of dreams is emplaced over it.

I bid dream-Cirruin goodbye and mentally prepared to return to Zenvo. With this new allowance to dive into these old memories, I knew much more about grief, and about men. I could not be Terus, but I’d do the best to honor the memory of my maker’s friend.

“I cannot be Terus, but I will, if you allow me to, wear his name with pride and honor,” I told the dream of Cirruin instants before leaving. When I appeared on the outskirts of Zenvo, so did he by my side.

“Would you like a new name, dream of Terus?”

I smiled and patted the snout of my maker’s avatar.

“I have no right to police how others call me, and they already accepted to call me Terus. It would be in the best interest of everybody not to shuffle things up.”

Cirruin’s avatar smiled and loomed proud over me. “You are doing a good job imitating his wisdom and kind heart. Fine, figment of my sorrow, you are allowed to keep his name. Wear and value it as the heirloom it should be. Good night, Terus, sweet dream.”

“And a sweet and happy one for you, Maker. You deserve it.”