I came out in the passage and when coming though the corner, I found her face to face. Even in the darkness her deep blue eyes stared at me, all seventeen of them. Only two of those eyes, mind you, are dragon eyes. The others are grafted into the scaly skin as a decoration, as a teen would use piercings. But these piercings look at you, and they beg, they beg for release from their prison of rotting flesh.

My heart sunk like it was hit with a nuclear torpedo when she approached and, among all of those eyes, I recognized one I have looked into so many times. As if crowning her forehead, as a tiara for a queen of torture, the eye I have looked into while kissing the sweetest of lips, the eye I have looked into while falling in love for the first time, it now decorates her putrid scales, forever crying. Abeline, this is not how I wanted to meet your beautiful gaze again.

“My Lady, I am sorry, I had trouble waking up,” I managed to say, deadpan, after a second. I needed to make sure my face didn’t betray my alertness, my newfound freedom.

“Spare me the protocol chatter, Pawn, just answer: Did you kill the sentinel and the dog?”

I bowed. “Yes, Lady Scarlet. I had my reasons.”

“I take you would not mind explaining them, then? Follow me to the blacksmith workshop, and when we arrive, I want to hear every little detail about why you did it!” She barked, long tendrils of murky saliva hanging from her maw.

She turned, and even with only the dim shine of a sheathed Jillsenbane my eyes, used to the darkness, could distinguish her azure wings. They are tattered, the membranes peel off or host festering pustules. Her claws left characteristic scars on the cave’s stone as she struggled to turn, marks one can recognize all over the places she frequents.

“Be quick of step, Pawn, I am not in the mood for waiting.” She said as she began to lumber away, up the tunnels.

I obliged. I watched her long, tapering tail swing from side to side, as if it wanted to use its bone needle of a tip to spar with the floor and its irregularities. I’d call this movement hypnotic, but, with this being Scarreladai, that could be taken quite literally. Soothing, let’s settle for calling it soothing.

She has good thighs, if one ignores the decaying scales and the patches of exposed, red muscle. When the hind leg extends, you can appreciate the fine work of digitigrade design that lies behind dragon locomotion. Maybe the only solace I have right now is finding little bubbles of beauty, of nature, in the sea of the macabre and artificial.

I tailed her up and down tunnels, taking the long path because she could not fit through the smaller holes I sometimes used as shortcuts. After a few minutes, we arrive at the entrance of the cave, where she had neatly separated the halves of the sentinel and laid them to the sides. The sunlight that came from the entrance was blinding, and I had to fight my instinct to cover my eyes or squint, averting my gaze towards other things I feigned to be interested in, like a stalagmite formation that used to be a weapon stand, or a mark on the wall that was particularly deep, and I remembered to be a broken tile in the illusionary palace.

“Well, Pawn, first question: why did you cut the Sentinel, my Sentinel, my servant, your companion, in half?”

“I feared he would interfere with the task assigned to me, My Dear Lady. That he would interfere while I got rid of the bear, if only because he didn’t know better. I know you can fix him up like you always do, so I considered it the lesser evil” I said, trying to keep a sycophantic smile on all the time.

She blinked with her own eyes, the ones she had inherited from her parents.

“You… came here to slay the bear? Where is the body then? Did you dispose of the body when not told to? You ought to inform me of these things!” she exclaimed, her sharp nightmarish teeth closer and closer to my face as I couldn’t help but stare into that meat grinder and pretend to be still under her spell.

“No, my dear Lady, if there is a body of the bear to be found it is not my fault. The bear was exiled for her inadequacy, for tarnishing the palace with her presence.”

She pulled her head back, surprised, and then examined me from head to toe.

“I ought to spell out things more clearly for this moron to do what I want,” she murmured, seemingly unaware of the fact that I could still hear her. “Listen, Pawn, when I say ‘run’, you run, correct?”

I nodded energetically “Correct, My Lady.”

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“And when I say ‘hunt down’, you hunt down, do you follow?”

“Yes, My Lady, I hunt down without a doubt.”

“But when I say, ‘Get rid of’ you exile the bear. Why?”

“Because that was the most humane way of undertaking that order, My Lady. You got mad when I killed the puppies, so I thought you would get mad if I were to hurt the bear, My Lady.”

She remained silent for about a minute. I would be unable to explain how much sweat ran down my face, how hard my heart beat, how many goosebumps populated my skin.

“I grant it, Pawn, I grant it: your actions are logically sound. But I still need to make you understand that to get rid of means to dispose, to kill, to murder, to take a life. Euphemisms, Pawn, they are the lifeblood of communication,” she made a strong emphasis on the “blood” part of the sentence.

“I am sorry my Lady, I genuinely thought you meant for me to exile the bear. If it is your wish, I may set to tracking her down and bring back her head, as an apology,” I offered, kneeling over the irregular ground, my knees not aching as they should due to the heavy callosities formed upon them.

It was a gamble. A gamble that she would not allow me to wander off just to track down a bear, yet that my willingness to do so would show my undying royalty for her. The Pawn didn’t know about the spell, after all: the palace was his reality, and I should hold the act up until the curtain call, even if the theatre is on fire and the smoke renders me blind.

“You will not. You will never do such thing, Pawn. The palace needs tending to, you cannot do like Gadorprims and go away to hunt things down.” She extended her left forelimb and used the upper side of her index claw to raise my chin. “There is no need for you to risk yourself for the skin of an ugly, run of the mill bear. There are many out there, and we have time, we have, oh, so much time. I have seen the dawn of bearkin and I will see their dusk. Don’t you agree? That we have all the time that gods have threaded, for men and dragons and beasts alike?” She smiled and the lower eyelid of fifteen eyes rose up, including Abeline’s. Her dragon ones, however, the ones she was born with, held a cold and serious stare. I know the game I am playing, but, I wonder: does she know too? And if not, what’s her game?

“Yes, my Lady, we have time. Plenty of.”

She laughed, and her breath made me grimace. I had to bluff, mask my disgust by pretending to be about to sneeze.

“That’s curious, you don’t do that often,” she said, referring to the sneeze.

Her left eye was put straight in front of my face, and I stared down into the scarred pond that judged me. In the morning light, I saw myself reflected in the eye of my captor, and I don’t know how I refrained from breaking down into the ugliest of cries. Maybe because I feared that would lead to my end, or out of shock born from the sight itself, of my emaciated visage inhabiting the space between her the iris, the pupil and the cornea. I felt like asking which was the reflection, the man trapped in the cave, or the man trapped in the eye? Who projected who forward, into the other side of the gelatinous orb, into reality?

After what felt like a tortuous eternity, Scarreladai withdrew her inspection.

“Must be the forge air. Or maybe you caught something when releasing the bear. Are you sure you feel healthy, Pawn?”

“More than never, My Lady.”

“Then control your bladder, you smell like urine.”

“Yes, Lady scarlet, Yes!” I cried.

I became all the more aware of the warm running down my legs, and ran down to the baths to clean myself and wash my rags.

Tripping, I fell into the water, and proffered a squeal unfit for a hero, for a man. The cold stung my eyes and nostrils, I swallowed some of the water and realized how foul it tasted.

I refrained myself from vomiting, lay with arms open in the floor as I coughed, and then, began to cry.

“I need the madman, I cannot survive without him! Give me back the madness, give me back the palace I worked in, Lady Scarlet! Let me back in! Just once more…” I lamented. I, once a prospective hero to be hailed by all of Bengia, slayer of two of the Burning Hill drake littermates, he who would put the dragon scourge on hold for as long as he lived, now look at me. Look at me, the one who failed! I need the madness, I have been stripped of the peace, the self-sufficiency that brought that peace, of the ability to rely on myself to solve my own problems. I can’t run away without saving dear, poor Abeline. I can’t save Abeline if I urinate myself at a mere exchange of words and stares; and I cannot not fear Scarreladai if she dons those eyes, if she casts those words with that voice. I have been domesticated, like a dog, but not any dog, no. I am not a Kangal, big and capable of fending for himself and protecting what he loves. Neither a Rottweiler, big and bad enough to scare the intruder in my life. Nor a Pit bull, to go for her throat and enjoy freedom one last time before being put down. Not even a god forsaken dachshund, whose original purpose was to scare badgers off their lairs. No. I am a terrifyingly inbred harmless little thing, something an alien civilization would have problem recognizing as an animal related to a Siberian husky, a Chihuahua or a Retriever. A pug of a man, how did I arrived to this state of being a pug of a man? A pug, goddamit.

I drew a sigil of heating, shivering, and curled against it. Nobody ever told me heat could feel so cold and impersonal, devoid of soul. Unhomely. It was worse than the suffocating midday sun of January. At least the sun has the romantic aura all things of nature that are mildly beneficial to men are granted in the collective psyche. I dispelled the glyph after I felt like I could manage as long as I began to move and kept on doing so.

I didn’t wash the rags. I didn’t rinse my legs. And here I am, in the hoard room, writing yet another entry. The Lady hasn’t come back yet, she must be working her magic on the zombie workers, stitching them back up into functional, perfect servants. They never complain, they never eat, they never whine, they never question, they never tire, they never ache. They never cry, they never betray. I cannot help but cry, I cannot help but betray. And here I am, in the hoard room, writing another yet entry.

I will take a proper bath before going to sleep. I need the madman, I need the madman, I need the madman.