Cara raised her broken blade and smashed it onto the protruding egg. The outer shell cracked open, and a flopping, oily thing floundered on the riverbank.

The force of her blow had severed the creature’s long, scaly limb from its shoulder, but it wasn’t dead yet.

It opened its long, toothy muzzle and whimpered, a baby’s cry for its parent. The inner lid of its eye blinked at her. Its long, fanned tail stretched out behind it, twitching.

“What is that thing?” Dayton was revolted and fascinated all at once. He squat on his heels and poked the baby monster with his cooking stick. It snapped and caught the stick. “Hey, give me that!”

“A kaprid. A swamp lizard. They’re like the larger, regular lizards you’ll find down south, but these grow limbs like a tiger.” Cara nudged the twitching form with her toe. “Full-grown, they can run as fast as a horse for short distances, and rip a rider from his saddle.”

Cara raised her foot, squinted at the squirming form, and swiftly brought her heel down on its head. She felt the skull crack through her boot.

“Gods above and below!”

Cara checked the bottom of her boot. “What?” She scraped off goo with former cooking stick.

But Dayton couldn’t answer, as he was too busy retching in the bushes. Cara thumped his back.

Eventually, he swiped the back of his hand over his mouth. He stared at Cara, his eyes wide and dark and unreadable.

“What?” Cara said again. She shifted uncomfortably in his stare, fingering the leather-wrapped haft of the broken sword.

“You just…” Dayton coughed. “Morgana speed it on, it was just a baby! You just… Cara!”

Cara’s mouth thinned at his censure. She turned her back on him and began to methodically hack at the mud mound that housed the eggs, ignoring Dayton’s shouts and pulls on her arm.

Dirt flew and spattered across them both. Wet splotches appeared as shells cracked and oozed albumen.

When the mound had been thoroughly destroyed, Cara stood, shoulders heaving, sword hilt gripped in her fist. She seemed to have forgotten that Dayton stood behind her. She slowly turned around.

Her face was dark, eyes shadowed, mouth a grim line. Her shoulders hunched, the long club of a weapon in her hand—she looked like an ogre, or a simulacrum out of some fairy tale of evil foreign sorcerers.

Dayton took an involuntary step back.

Her words, when they came, were so low, so soft, that Dayton wasn’t sure he could hear them.

“Monster spawn grow into monsters. Monsters kill and hunt and maim and destroy everything, without fail, without exception.”

A night breeze sprang up, making the cooking fire hiss and flare. Amber light flashed across her features.

“That’s what Heroes do. We protect people, from monsters like these” —an impatient gesture took in the broken nest behind her, the patches of dark ichor soaking into the already sodden ground— “wherever they are. Because if you don’t, then the people you love most die. Like Ada.”

Her voice died to a whisper. Her body wilted. The jagged metal tip of what remained of her sword touched the ground.

“Ada?”

A pause.

“My little sister. A rahk took her. Desert bird,” she added before he could ask. “They usually stay in the deep dunes and harass the caravans, but come to the edges of the scrubland when they’ve got nestlings to feed. After it happened, my… my old Master… He killed the one that killed Ada.”

Cara no longer resembled some fearsome figure of legends, merely a very tired, very young woman who could really use a meal.

Dayton coughed, tried to think of something that would break the tension.

“They’re… they’re not poisonous, right?”

“The rahk? No. They don’t need to be.”

“No, I meant the eggs. I don’t want my dinner to kill me.”

Cara seemed to revive a bit at the weak joke. She took a step out from Dayton’s shadow, letting the firelight caress her cheeks and collarbone with kisses of warmth. “Yes, they should be fine. Can’t imagine why not, anyway.”

“That’s very encouraging,” Dayton drawled, and Cara unbent enough for a small chuckle.

“You owe me a new cooking stick,” he added.

Cara offered him the branch she’d pried from the dead kaprid’s needle teeth.

“You can keep that one.”

Cara shrugged and tossed it into the river. It plopped in the water, the monster’s ichor washing off with the wavelets.

“I’ll find you another, then—assuming the eggs you had cooking already aren’t burnt to cinders.”

Dayton yelped. He scurried back to the fireside and tilted the pan to view the rather blackened contents. “It’s good that I saved these three eggs, then.”

He winced then at the phrasing, but Cara didn’t seem to notice his misstep.

“There’s also jerky in the supplies. That should’ve survived the river, even if the bread is toast now.”

Dayton was startled into a laugh at the dry bit of humor, and Cara smiled despite herself. “Okay, maybe it’s not toast yet, but let me see if we can salvage it anyway.”

Cara moved back to the boat and its damp cargo.

Dayton turned back to the pile of kaprid eggs beside the fire. He considered them for a moment, wondering at the difference between his response to the eggs as opposed to the aborted hatchlings.

When is something alive, he wondered, and when is it just… potential?

The monks of Riana and Luarin taught that all life was sacred and should be protected, except in the direst of circumstances.

Those who followed the Morgana and Cern were less… sentimental about such things.

Two for, two against. The bright and the dark. Death that was a beginning, and life that was the closing of a door of possibilities. Painful change to prevent stagnation, and the peace that brought corruption. The divine was balance, was opposites-that-weren’t.

And as he meditated on these things, staring at the eggs, he was so absorbed on his inner thoughts that he nearly missed what his eyes were trying to tell him. The shells of the “full” eggs were beginning to buckle.

“C-Ca…” He tried to wet his lips, to call for the woman by the boat with her sliver of a sword, but he couldn’t force the shout out of his throat. His chest tightened with anxiety.

The top half of the kaprid egg lifted, as if the occupant were peeking to see if the way were clear for it to emerge.

Dayton watched, fascinated, as a clawed hand emerged to pluck a shard from the baby kaprid’s head, as if it were an oddly shaped hat. He stifled a chuckle, and the noise prompted the newborn to turn its delicate head up to face Dayton.

The baby monster’s pupils were round, he saw, and surrounded by an acid-yellow iris that almost glowed in the night.

And then he didn’t think anything more, as he and the baby monster drowned in each other’s eyes like reunited lovers.