DER DRACHE

German, "the dragon"

Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive. -- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Karandren's screeches echoed off the walls. Diarnlan winced and wanted to cover her ears. It was a pity that in this form she both couldn't cover them and technically didn't have ears to cover anyway.

"Will you shut up?" she yelled. "You're the most ridiculous creature I've ever had the misfortune of knowing! You'll face skrýszel and jǫtnar without flinching but you're terrified of something you yourself created?"

Karandren finally shut up. She suspected it was more because he'd run out of breath than because he'd calmed down. He gawked at her as if he'd never seen this ugly lump of metal before. Really, of all the places she could have ended up, why did it have to be the bloody dragon? Being an ordinary ghost would have been preferable!

Though come to think of it, were there such things as ordinary ghosts? Diarnlan briefly got distracted by pondering this. By the time she brought her thoughts back to the present Karandren had also recovered.

"...Diarnlan?" he asked faintly.

She glared at him. "No, I'm the Dragon God[1] come to drag you down to the underworld for creating this monstrosity."

For a moment there was silence. Karandren stared up at her with a bug-eyed expression that suggested he believed her. Diarnlan began to reconsider her choice to come here. Being sent back to the in-between place would have been much less irritating.

"You're joking?" Karandren asked. With more certainty he continued, "Of course you're joking. But what are you doing in my dragon?"

"It's a very long story," Diarnlan snapped.

"And? We have plenty of time. The politicians won't bother me until tomorrow. I'll boil them in oil if they try."

Diarnlan tried to raise an eyebrow in confusion. She failed because the dragon didn't have eyebrows to raise or any ability to change its expression at all. "Politicians? Since when does Miavain have politicians?"

She distinctly remembered that she'd had to recruit some very confused and frightened law students to become makeshift politicians the last time she'd been here.

"Since I started trying to turn this into a civilised country."

Diarnlan stared at him. Then she looked around at the room to make sure she wasn't dreaming. No, she couldn't possibly imagine such ugly tiles on the floor. "Civilised? You? Did you hit your head or is all that dark magic finally taking its toll?"

Karandren glared at her. "Remember that I created that dragon and I can melt it down again with one spell. What do you think will happen to you if I do that?"

She tried to shrug and only succeeded in scraping the dragon's claws over the floor. It was an improvement, considering that she'd partially obscured one of the incomprehensible drawings -- was it meant to be a bird or a snail? -- on the tiles. "I don't know but it can't be any worse than what's already happened."

Karandren waited expectantly. Diarnlan sighed and filled him in on the events of the last few days. Had it really only been two days since she first felt someone was watching her? It seemed so much longer.

"You must be making some of that up," Karandren protested several times during her story.

Only the determination to finish telling everything before she got side-tracked again prevented her from starting an argument over that. When she finished Karandren looked more baffled than she'd ever seen him look before.

"The skrýszel are pets? Pets? So we could defeat them by just throwing them a bone and calling them a good boy?"

Diarnlan imagined them doing just that. It was an even more surreal picture than her thought of taking them for walks. "I doubt that would work."

"Then what will work? Because according to you they're going to keep coming through the veil no matter how many times we relive our lives and there isn't a damn thing we can do to stop them!" He paused and considered this. "What about that Vanadel person? He's like me, isn't he? Maybe I could talk to him and convince him to stop this."

"He was going to kill me!"

"That's another thing he and I have in common."

Diarnlan snarled. To her surprise she actually managed to make the dragon's face contort into a snarl too. Alas, Karandren looked completely unconcerned.

"He isn't human at all. I don't mean genetically, I mean in his behaviour. He's nothing like you; at least you know how to pretend to be human. He's more likely to want to kill you too."

Karandren shrugged dismissively. "And if he kills me I'll just go back and start over again. Without the trouble of ruling Miavain, too."

"I thought you wanted to rule Miavain."

"I did until I tried it."

That didn't make sense. He'd tried several times and had never seemed to mind it before. Diarnlan wondered just what had been happening in Miavain since she left.

"He's not interested in you," she said instead. "If he was he would have kidnapped you too. He just wanted to study me like some sort of zoological specimen."

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Karandren grinned and opened his mouth. Diarnlan interrupted before he could speak.

"If the next words out of your mouth are any sort of joke I'll bite you in half."

"You can't do that."

"I can try."

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So many strange things had happened in Miavain lately that one would think nothing could shock the politicians any more. One would think wrong.

When they arrived in the room set aside for their discussions they stopped and gawked at the statue in the middle of the room. It hadn't been there yesterday. Nor was it anything akin to the statues normally found in Miavain. It was made of at least twelve different kinds of metal -- gold, silver, iron, copper, and goodness knew what else. It glittered many different colours when the light struck it. And it was a dragon. The Bone-Worshippers had never made statues of dragons. They viewed the whole species as embodiments of evil.

The politicians gathered around the statue and murmured amongst themselves.

"It must be a gift from Avallot. Those barbarians will make statues of anything," someone suggested.

"I think it's meant to scare us," someone else said.

"What idiot made this thing? Those metals don't belong together!"

"It's garish."

"It's tasteless."

"I think it's a practical joke."

All the comments and grumblings came to an abrupt and horrified halt. The dragon moved its head. It looked down at all of them, focusing its glowing blue eyes on each of them in turn. A chorus of frightened gasps and whimpers rose from the politicians. Everyone froze as they waited to see what it would do next. Nothing happened for several nightmarish minutes. Then the statue -- or was it a real dragon? -- snorted and shook its head.

"No wonder he doesn't want to deal with you," it said in a distinctly female voice with a foreign accent. A foreign accent that was similar to their new king's, but stronger and harder to understand. "All of you sit down. Your king--" It -- she? None of the politicians knew how to refer to the dragon -- put a sarcastic emphasis on the word. One of the politicians could have sworn he saw her roll her eyes, "--has decided not to bother talking to you today. Instead you'll tell me all your bright ideas. I warn you, do not waste my time."

Quite a few politicians immediately decided the matters they'd wanted to raise weren't so important after all.

"Well?" the dragon snapped after a minute passed and no one moved. "Sit down!"

They scurried to their assigned seats, feeling like they were schoolchildren back under the thumb of their most hated teacher.

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"So, how did it go?"

"I hate you. I hate them too, but you're the one who dragged me into this farce."

"It didn't go well, then."

"They want to create a tax on windows. Windows. I told them that if they dislike the things so much I'll happily have them locked up in a windowless dungeon."

"That's the way to deal with them! Show them who's boss!"

"Shut up or I'll have you locked up in a windowless dungeon."

"You can't do that. This is my palace, and you can't even move that statue on your own."

"Yet. I can't move it yet."

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It was unfortunately only too true that Diarnlan couldn't move the statue. Karandren could control it with his magic, but it didn't respond to hers. She could move its head and open or close its mouth, but apart from that the most she'd managed to move it was to occasionally shift one foot. She couldn't lift its feet off the ground, leading to many new scrapes on the floor. With any luck she'd soon destroy all of those ugly tiles.

She practiced trying to control it. A week passed and nothing changed. Nor could she remove her spirit from the dragon. Somehow she'd managed to get herself well and truly stuck to it. It was at times like this that Diarnlan really believed fate had a grudge against her.

Karandren made things much worse, of course. He took advantage of her inability to leave to talk at her about all of his hare-brained schemes. They ranged from reanimating the bodies of the priests and using them as his guards to trying to open a hole in the veil right in the middle of the palace.

"If you want to meddle in necromancy make sure you tell me beforehand," she said in reply to the first suggestion. "I want to watch. From a safe distance."

The second one was much worse. Diarnlan's immediate reaction was a horrified scream. "You're out of your mind! Imagine what would happen if a skrýszel appeared in the palace!"

"But I might be able to get through the veil then go and talk to Vanadel," Karandren protested.

Since her death and arrival in the statue Diarnlan hadn't sensed Vanadel watching her again. That didn't necessarily mean he wasn't watching. The idea made a chill run down her spine. But if he was, then he already knew Karandren wanted to meet him and was in no hurry to grant his wish. That was probably the only good decision Vanadel had made in his life. Diarnlan didn't even want to imagine what would happen if those two ended up in the same room under any circumstances. They'd probably bring about the destruction of the universe.

After two weeks of being stuck in the statue Diarnlan was seriously considering suicide again. For want of anyone else to talk to she asked Karandren about it. "How do you think I could die in this form?"

He thought for a minute. "An exorcism spell?"

"Try one. Please."

Karandren shook his head emphatically. "It might damage my dragon."

Diarnlan tried to punch him. All she managed to do was scrape the floor again.

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Like all of the other lifetimes it was inevitable this one would end under skrýszel-related circumstances. Diarnlan wasn't even surprised when news came from Avallot that two monsters had come through the veil and were making their way towards Miavain.

"Why are they coming here?" Karandren wondered.

"Because their owners know we're here and are betting on how quickly we'll kill them." Diarnlan considered this for a while. "I wonder how much money they'll lose if we just refuse to fight."

Karandren didn't seem to hear her. He was too busy issuing orders to the very confused guards -- human guards, thankfully, since he had given up that terrible idea of using necromancy to turn the priests into guards.

Diarnlan thought more about her idea while everyone waited for the monsters to arrive. Karandren had very foolishly agreed to give her control over breathing fire -- only because he wanted part of the palace demolished and didn't want the bother of doing it himself, but the point was that she now had a weapon. She also had a great deal of spite towards the world in general and the skrýszels' owners in particular.

"You're planning something," Karandren said suspiciously. How he'd managed to figure that out when she still wasn't capable of facial expressions was a mystery. "If you're going to kill yourself again, wait until I leave the palace. I'm sick of being killed by you."

Diarnlan rolled her eyes. "How is being killed by a skrýszel better?"

"It isn't. I just have a better chance of getting revenge and permanently killing the damn things."

That seemed like an utterly ludicrous explanation to her. But even so she waited until he went out to confront the approaching monsters on his own. The guards left to evacuate the civilians. Soon Diarnlan was alone in the palace.

She wasn't remotely surprised when one of the skrýszels appeared at the palace gate. It wasn't one she'd seen before. Unlike the others it looked like a walking tree rather than an animal.

It stalked into the palace, crashing through doorways and walls. Diarnlan waited until it was far enough into the building to be trapped when the roof fell. Then she set the whole place on fire.

Judging by its cut-off roars the skrýszel died quickly. Diarnlan had to wait until the ceiling collapsed on top of her. It crushed the statue into a misshapen hunk of metal.

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Diarnlan opened her eyes and sighed wearily when she saw the tree. "I'm getting sick of this place."

A snowball flew over her head.

"Damn it, how did I miss?" Karandren muttered somewhere off to the side.

Diarnlan sat up before he could throw another one. "Well? How did you die this time?"

"Trampled by a skrýszel. You?"

"Crushed by a roof."

"Well, at least that's a new and unique way of dying."

He dodged Diarnlan's punch, but he overbalanced and fell into a snowdrift in the process.