I slept on the meadows in the countryside and dreamed myself all over Zenvo once again. Mardhaka noticed the sudden apparition of about a dozen avatars in her proximities. Her veil of crows and parrots stirred colors twirling as the servile birds fluttered about. I approached her from every angle of the plaza on the center of which she had landed.
My avatars closed in, equidistant, their movements synchronized to a t. The dress of living birds Mardhaka donned grew more and more riotous with every step that my avatars took. The crows cawed, the parrots screamed, the cockatoos squawked. And, when I got closer, and the gathered crowd dissipated around the strange men that moved unlike pebbles rolling down the hillside.
This clearing of the masses allowed me to see Orphela sitting in front of Cirruin’s daughter. She had her legs crossed, and upon her lap rested a heavy encyclopedia. She was reading a passage from it. It was about rainforest birds.
“A face long unseen returns from beyond the veil. Did you dream yourself back to me, Terus? It was high time you did. I got unfathomably bored waiting for you.” Mardhaka said in the tongue of dragons.
I woke up, and before opening the eyes, I willed myself in front of the Avian Mistress. The birds flew in circles above her head, depicting several interlocked glorioles circling above her head, entangling on her horns so black. Crowned in foreboding murder and gay pandemonium, she snickered as she watched me scramble to my feet, with Orphela behind me, visibly vexed by my presence.
“We don’t need you to act as a savior, we have dealt with the Mistress before, go away!” Orphela barked.
“Ignore her, Mardhaka. I am the one that struck the bird-information deal with you. You should have waited for me to return.”
The birds landed on her skin, arranged in such a way that their tails pointed outwards as spikes born from her body.
“My time is too valuable, Terus, infinitely more so than yours. I thought we had already stablished this as a fact. I needed more information about birds, so I came to your source and did a personal investigation. I beckoned for the names I had heard from your lips: Orphela the Reader and Teacher, Dariel the Carpenter and Listener. And they did serve me well, they served me while the guards trembled like frail leaves as my illusions torn their minds apart. Nothing that would scar them for life, of course, just some slight self-preservation measures.”
I walked up to my dear sister and gave her leg a backhanded slap. That made Mardhaka screech terrifyingly, with her eyes shining red, and the birds flying away for dear life. The townsfolk, too, ran frantically. Only Orphela remained in the scene: Dariel had escaped with their child, possibly looking for a place to safely stash the girl into and return for Orphela.
“You treacherous roach, how dare you disrespect me like that!”
“Terus what are you doing?” cried, terrified, Orphela. I ignored her, there was a more important matter at hand.
“You disrespected our deal first, Mardhaka.”
“You disappeared for nearly a lustrum, dream. Look at you, no older than four years ago, still as fresh and defiant.” Mardhaka enveloped my head with her paw and started pressuring. It hurt, but to fight it would have been useless. “You know of the pain of we who live, of how we fear and despise the time that whittles our very cores down into nothingness. There is no subtle way to say this: A deal with you, Terus, is not worth the saliva spent on speaking its terms. I entertained you out of respect for my father, but if he can forget you for four years on end…” She started increasing the pressure, my skull giving in. Getting one’s head crushed like a grape is not an experience I recommend to anyone that would not be reborn in the mouth of a cave.
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When I revived, I didn’t rush to Zenvo. Mardhaka felt insulted by me, but, judging by her actions beforehand, she had developed certain appreciation for the settlement. You could see in the stare she dedicated Orphela: the same one Cirruin dedicated to Terus once long ago.
When I arrived back at the plaza Orphela was gone, and the birds had returned to frolic all over their mistress, who, curled around a water fountain, sang the only song her mother had ever taught her. This song cannot be accurately expressed on human words. Many of the vocalizations are sounds dragons make that have no direct translation and that the human vocal apparatus cannot faithfully imitate. And without them, it would not read like a song written by dragons, friend.
Mardhaka sang with her eyes closed, and I joined her after considering it for a few moments. Mardhaka was a dragon, thus she fostered the legendary hubris of one. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t, still, a sort of friend of mine.
We sang to the concept of the sun seen from beyond a thin veil of water, we sang to the fires as a manifestation of dusk on earth. We sang, too, to the dragon curses, that were, as sad and terrible as it may be, my lifeblood.
In the end, I leaned against Mardhaka, the birds moving to avoid being crushed under my body, and eventually got covered in the little animals as she was. Little claws fighting for purchase on my clothes and hair.
“This sensation is nightmarish,” I commented.
Mardhaka didn’t open her eyes to answer. “It feels good upon the scales.”
“But your father imagines it doesn’t upon the skin. My skin is made of the sensation he feels on the inside of his mouth when dry. I am made as though of tongues sewn onto each other, Mardhaka.”
Her tail came as a thunder and swatted me away, sending the birds into a panicked and raucous flight. “Yuck. You are forbidden from touching me. Ever. I don’t want a dream of my father tasting my skin.”
“I have no taste on the skin, and, besides, birds defecate upon you constantly.” I pointed out, still sprawled on the floor.
“…this conversation is over. Any insistence on your part to prolong it will be met with extreme violence,” she sentenced.
“Your treats of violence are void of meaning. I don’t care about being killed or tortured,” I said, and began sauntering back to her.
“Annoying pest, at least killing you is cathartic. I am not biting you ever again. Tongues, ugh.”
Sunset was upon us, tinting the skies with the colors of a mango. The rose and orange clouds seemed to escape us, to leave with the sun in the distance. And just as the clouds, the birds that covered Mardhaka parted. They fluttered away: crows with crows, each variety of parrot with their equals. In the end, Mardhaka’s wings also extended.
“In the day, the serve me. In the night, they serve themselves. And their loyalty is not subject to any whims. I made no deal with the crows or the parrots, they follow me out of their own volition. Isn’t it astonishing, Terus? How the small, keen animals were able to understand the benefits of serving one such as me. Look at them fly away, back to their nests, to the trees and holes they hold so, so dear.”
A beat of silence passed. Mardhakaa closed her wings and stared at me in the eyes.
“I keep feathers from every last one of them, Terus. As if I were allowed to keep them forever if I gathered enough of their feathers. Deranged alchemical thinking of mine, I know, and yet… I cannot get myself to stop gathering mementos from the birds. Half a century from now, they all will be gone and only those feathers will remain. No… I, too, will remain. Birds, men. Dragons are not supposed to befriend any of them, yet we, in our hubris, do. My father is the same. Did he tell you who your namesake was already?”
I nodded.
“Good. I wonder if, when I am old and grey, I will dream not with a man, but with the dearest of my birds, that one I may haven’t met still, that perhaps I will cherish above all others. “
“I guess we are not so different then, Mardhaka. I am going to the library, see if I can find something juicy for you. Any subject in particular you wish to know about?”
Mardhaka shook her head and then took flight.
“That’s Orphela’s worry now, Terus. The world carried on during your absence, don’t try to fit it in your little pathetic box of right ways again, for it won’t.”
And she flew away, leaving me alone in the benighted plaza, as the dogs began to return to sleep on the benches and undertake their urinary rituals on the local trees. Terus liked dogs, or so Cirruin knows, but considered they fostered one unforgivable flaw, and thus refused to own one as a pet. He never said what was that flaw, but Cirruin suspects it was the same men and bird share.