FSE

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Outside the cave, through the firelight, Damien can see Tatrix's huge form, glimmering in the moonlight from the emeralds cascading motionlessly down his body. The green seems to have spread, and darkened, and somehow it has soaked his tail as well, making it thicker, and smoother. Across from him, Glen is sitting, and the two of them are talking intently, but with the glimmer of friendliness. He tries to listen, though he doesn't try to move - his back and his chest both hurt indescribably, and he doesn't want to look down.

"...survived by transmuting emotion..."

"...a very strange child... mother is a bitch..."

"...known him for a decade... you and his wife..."

He perks his ears.

"Yeah, and I haven't loved a woman the same way since. She's amazing. I'm really happy for Siber; he deserves her." He pauses, as though relaxing his throat so he can speak again. The moment passes patiently. "I'm sorry; even for me, this is just too much at once. My lover's husband, my best friend, my... my son, if you're telling me the truth, and... and you... You're gorgeous, Tatrix!"

The great wolf, for all his power, for all his size and strength, blushes as a smile creeps onto his face, as well. It seems tinged with taught nostalgia, though. "Thank you. I'm glad to be able to confide in you. This will hurt Siber, very badly. He's never been stable. It was only by taking advantage of that that I could get him to come out here in the first place, to meet Damien. I'm sure he's forgotten his other children at the moment. The madness... creeps, and ebbs, and flows, and shrinks and overwhelms."

Glen nods, cupping his chin in his hands. "I know. I feel it, too. Siber's always been something like a mirror for me. The sorcerer to my science. The animal to my humanity. I felt it, in his wife's response to me, and in Damien. And speaking of which." He does his best to draw up one eyebrow, peering out of the corners of his eyes at Tatrix. "That biology doesn't work, and for all Siber's told me, that magic doesn't work, either. So what is Damien?"

"Human. Even magic won't mix chromosomes around like that."

"So... what, he's my clone?"

"Magic will, however, make some key changes to the thaumaturgic architecture of the chromosomes."

"Epithaumogenetics." The man snorts derisively. "You'd think as part of the war effort, human universities would, you know, actually give half a damn about learning more about it."

"Hm. Academic elitism aside, Damien is a child of human physiology and wolf-man magic. He is receptive to both medical treatment and healing spells. As you may have noticed, he is particularly adapted to earth magic. Hm. So much so, you might say earth magic is fond of him, instead."

Glen's eyes billowed open. "The brook. His back." Behind them, Damien feels a jump in his stomach.

The great wolf nodded, the emerald flowing freely now, coating him in a murmuring tidal wave of slowly dulling green. Pinpricks of starlight blossom in the depths of his black eyes. "Siber is one of the strongest magicians out there, though he has a complete lack of finesse and very little capacity for planning. Obviously, his only option was to wed someone with either the power to beat back his insanity, or the subtlety to ensnare it. So Damien's wolf half is brimming with... well, I hate to call energy 'clever,' but without getting into details, that's what it is."

"Makes sense. And I'm starting to put together some of your motivations for doing what you've done, being who you are. What escapes me is Tetra." The set of his jaws and the evenness of his stare and the quietude of his voice say that Tetra has not escaped him at all. Tatrix isn't human and isn't a wolf-man. Therefore, Tetra either isn't his daughter or isn't, either.

"Clearly she doesn't," Tatrix lilts with a little, knowing smirk. The two of them wait in silence for several moments, both wondering whether the larger creature plans on elaborating. He doesn't. Damien narrows his eyes.

"Ha, ha. So why the guise? Why hide so much of this from Siber?" The slightest hint of defensiveness, of a protective nature, edges its way into his voice, a buzzing bee scouting ahead of the rest of the hive. "You know how I feel about him."

"You know how unstable he is, how stubborn. You said yourself, you're his mirror. I waited until he was so unstable, so stubborn, that I could create a reason for him to come out here."

"For a decade? And that's my son you're using." The warmth of warning boils underneath his calm.

"You didn't know it. And besides, there's a reason for that." Glen's stomach clenches uncertainly. He isn't used to not understanding. And the transforming wolf-man seems progressively familiar. Tatrix is unperturbed. His fur continues to vanish under the verdant tide, and his muzzle begins elongating. "Again. You said yourself, you're his mirror."

"What is Tetra?" He tries to slap the conversation back into his court. He doesn't want to talk about something with which he isn't comfortable. Behind the two of them, within the cave, Damien and Siber begin to stir. "No one survives a hole through the chest like that. It pierced her lung, shredded her breast. Even your magic hasn't reached- or... lupine magic hasn't reached that far, I mean. Repairing that much in that short a time." His voice becomes snappish, balsa staff unstable as it tries to assert dominance. "Along with the poison. And he's in love with her. And he told me she killed a Black. Children can't kill the Black. It takes emotional control that they simply don't have." Snap, snap, crack. "You're breaking both of them. Pushing them to their limits. Coming-of-age, throwing everything they thought was sane in the air so it can fall back into a new place. But why? And why not tell me? Ten years! Damien's life has been shit without me. What are you, Tatrix?"

Golden, reptilian eyes meet Glen's sapphires in the glittering night, and for a brief moment, a draconic countenance smiles. "Ah, you have forgotten about me. You and I should talk more, Glen."

Damien stands up at the sight of Glen and Tetra stepping out of the mouth of the cave. Without a breath's hesitation, he dashes after them, bare feet slapping the floor, the cave applauding at least one person's timing. His eyes are filled with the dim, warm glow of hope, but when he reaches the entrance, he stares in confusion, while the fire of pain begins to rip through his chest. No one is there. He looks behind him, gritting his teeth against the pain, and sees Siber, not yet awake. Damien narrows his eyes, shades closing over his personal moonlight. Everyone is leaving him again. Tatrix is gone. Tatrix is Tetra? Tetra is gone. Glen is gone. And Damien is alone. And he doesn't know what he is, or why all these people care.

This will not continue.

He stalks back towards the blue wolf with steps like lilies, making no sound, and moss grows underneath his steps, and he pushes his face under Siber's arms, curling up against him almost violently, demanding comfort and presence. "Give me this," he whispers. "Please. I hate being alone." The pain stays, but strong arms suddenly tighten around his frame and pull his back against a thin but powerful chest, curling up around him possessively and refusing to let him go.

"You're my son," a whisper returns, the first rattles of chips of slate before an avalanche. "You're him. You're mine." A mad fire is in Siber's eyes, but Damien can't see it, and they lie like that, in the darkness, and Damien thinks of nothing, nothing but the body holding him, and being with him.

When they finally awake, at dawn, the boy stoically refuses to move. Siber, though, pushes him out of his arms and stands up, stretching his arms and wings as he walks to the cave entrance.

"Where did the others go?" quests a lone cirrus cloud, begging not to be evaporated by the rising sun. "Where's Tetra?"

The wolf refuses to answer. He closes his eyes, raises his hand for a moment, then closes it into a fist. Then, he beckons with his free paw and begins walking down the mountain. Damien hesitates for a moment, then strips off his shirt, revealing a chest far better defined than it had been so many weeks ago, and follows, silently. He jumps on Siber's back, but the lupine creature spins impossibly fast and somehow slides his feet back, so Damien lands on his back as Siber falls to the ground over him. The boy cries out in pain as the closed, but still-sensitive wound crashes against the rocky pathway, then arches his back and gasps when the wolf's jaws close around his throat. All he can think of is their second meeting, underwater, with his neck closed in that insane, protective grasp. His mind flashes back to how it was set, then, and while pinpricks of blood begin to trickle from his back and from his throat, he stares up at the bright blue sky, with its harried nimbus and guffawing sun, heat interrupted by a giddy wind that sets the trees around them to cackling. He can see the glorious, gold-sapphire gradient along the morning horizon, and by the time he stops noticing things, Siber is several dozen yards away, leaving him. Damien remembers hearing, while he was focused on the world, "I don't know who you are, and I don't know what to do."

Half a mile's walk away, they have been following the banks of the creek, and Siber sits down next to it. There are four fat fish lying there, and he begins slitting open their bellies with his claws. "Bring firewood," he says calmly.

Damien narrows his eyes and starts to move off in search of it.

"No." The noise is quiet, but cuts the landscape - a cheese wire command. "Need firewood."

"I know," Damien answers, staring at the back of Siber's head. "I'm going to get it."

"Not a statement. A command."

Damien puts it together quickly. "I'm not going to tell the plants to grow so I can burn them. I don't know how. Glen says you know magic. You do it."

"Need. Firewood."

"That won't work anymore!" Damien shouts at him. His veneer of not knowing how to feel is cracking. He has felt so little, for so long, and all of it has been crusted over and broken and glossed and shattered so often in the past months that none of the emotion makes sense anymore.

"Need wood."

The avalanche, begun the night before, reveals itself as an erupting flow of lava. "No! I won't! I was happy! I stopped loving my mom, for you! I fell in love with Tetra, for you! I learned to breathe, to sing, to dance, to do everything, for you! You demanded everything from me! You made me change! Stop making me do things! Stop making me want you!" Siber won't even look over his shoulder. "I don't understand! I want everything! I want you! I want my mom! I want Glen! I want Tetra, and Tatrix! I want to be like you, but I'm so scared of you! And STOP THAT!!!" He suddenly reaches forward and grabs Siber's chin, using his other paw to wipe off the golden liquid leaking from the wolf's placid eyes. "You don't even cry right! You don't feel! You just do, and try to make everyone else do the things you want them to! You try! Stop trying! Stop trying and be!"

The answer tumbles out like a rivulet of blood from a bite wound. "But I don't know how to be like you. I was, once." Below them, as though a flock of birds were taking off through branches above, the forest flickers with blackness. The trees whimper.

Damien's assault begins to pile up against the wall of Siber's regret, but he doesn't want to stop, to stop feeling again. He felt so much, with Tetra, and laughed with Glen. Laughing. Strength. "Play with me," he whispers, releases Siber, and darts a hundred feet uphill.

The wolf looks at him with those ever-fossilized eyes, clearly feeling compelled to stay exactly where he is. But Damien demands that he move. And in Damien's demand the young boy has somehow found light in his own eyes again. Blue fur snaps with speed and flies up the slope towards him, but Damien meets him with a finger on his nose and a sudden, uncertain, struggling flame of a grin.

"That's not how you play. That's mad." Siber is as still as a statue, and tilts his head in question, as much animal as he had been the first time the two of them met. "I know you're not angry. This is how you play." The boy can feel his mimicry of the girl. Still, he snakes his hand towards Siber's rib cage, and after a moment's tickling, it's as though sensitivity blossoms in wolf-man, and he yelps and twitches.

Damien is swaying between triumph and terror. He doesn't understand what he is doing. He's nervous. He's giddy. He tickles Siber's other side. The wolf yelps again, and Damien dashes further up the hillside. Siber follows. They make love in the form of a game of tag.

It lasts for hours upon hours, until both of them are soaked in sweat and crusted in forest detritus, and panting on their backs in a small glade just barely inside the shade of the trees. Everything around them laughs or smiles. Somehow, the Black have not caught up to them. Maybe the elements took care of them. Maybe they were blinded by the sudden broken floodgates of emotion from two living boulders.

Regardless, they have time for Siber to reach up a paw, blank his eyes for a moment, and summon up a pair of rabbits and some firewood from deeper in the forest. He sets it burning, then crouches down next to Damien, who has gotten to his knees, and hands the boy an extra knife. Together, the two of them skin the animals, Siber showing the boy how to work his knife, and always keeping a wing open over him. They take the feet to turn into charms, and keep the pelts, for Siber to enchant and make into something for the boy. They set the two rabbits to roasting on spits over the fire, and then Siber lies down on his back in the rich loam, which gives easily to make a bed.

Damien sits next to him, studying him, then on impulse, wants to go back to the moment they truly met - a madness conveyed out of reality and a stunted youthfulness, not knowing how to interact - so he quietly strips out of his clothes, shuddering with nervousness as he does, then releases the strap on the wolf's loincloth. The wolf's eyes open in mild surprise and confusion, and he watches, waiting to see what is happening. Damien licks his dry lips to see the other creature's animal parts, then kneels next to Siber's waist. He thinks about having been in the wolf's lap that night, and fights down both the rising carnality and his fear, the fear amplified by his dreams. Embarrassed, Damien scoots up a couple inches to shift his field of view, then leans to one side and carefully spreads one of Siber's wings open. He drags his fingers across it, the way he has seen Tatrix do it, and a thrill of pleasure wiggles through him when he feels the chest under him expand in a pleased gasp, and sees the wolf's eyes close. He continues like that for long minutes before crawling to the other side and repeating the process. He marvels at the strangeness of how the wing connects above Siber's shoulder blade, and power of the muscle mounded there. He gasps in strained elation when the wolf's fingers touch him, caressing him, and shudders. Finally finished, he lies down on Siber's open chest, listening to his breathing and heartbeat, and the older male closes his arms and wings about the boy, sheltering him and stroking him. A simple movement of his fingers douses the fire, and for a long while, they rest.

"Alright. So let's talk. Dragon." A stream chuckles gaily beneath the pair of guardians. Its tempo of rippling bubbles through Glen's stomach with his nervousness. He wonders what Damien sees. How does Damien hear this world? What has been lost, by not being able to raise his own son? A memory of a time he better understood it nags at him, chewing at his consciousness. "Why am I suddenly in this?"

They have spent the past several hours walking back closer to the town and chatting about the world, and about dragons. Every time Glen tried to move the conversation to anything of meaning, or concerning Siber or Damien, the dragon shifted it back to talks of history and evolution. The human knows, somehow, that he recognizes the dragon. Maybe it's to do with how he 'mirrors' Siber, but he'd always meant that metaphorically. It was a deeper knowledge, though. An old, ancient friendship. But there was a definite disconnect. There was the absence-chasm of years of not consummating the friendship - the deep-carved forgetting-river keeping the synapse of memory from closing, no matter that each side could see the other. Glen had been on the fringes of civilization for years, feeling apart from all of it even while bedding it, together only during brief moments, but every second with this dragon feels correct, and close.

Golden eyes peer out of a verdant skull, and the creature Tatrix has revealed himself to be leans back against Glen's back - shirtless, from the day's earlier heat. "You're the boy's father. And Siber's mirror."

"So, what, this is some sort of therapy session for them? Or do I have a more physical purpose? I thought they were saving the world. You're a dragon." I believed in dragons, once. "If you're alive, it means you haven't given a single damn about the rest of the world for whole epochs. I want to know what your technology is like, how your magic works, and where the hell you have all been hiding for so long." All of those have already been answered. Just, now that the conversation has started, it is already going a different direction than Glen had intended, and he's skilled at making things go his way. He recently adopted a child without any paperwork, for example.

"I'm a dragon. Everything I do is saving the world." Glen can hear the smile in those words, but also the mild, rich taste of truth, the honey in a honey-baked ham, that speaks to the dragon's arrogance.

"Alright, fine, let's go that route for a while. I'm not missing anything." Lies. But said with bitterness. So, really, truths. "This is about the two of them; why bring me into this?" he repeats, trying to ignore how much he enjoys the warmth of another creature's body supporting his back. "I mean, yeah, I'm a bachelor, but it's not like I've got no one to love. I love relatively regularly and with wide variety."

"Damien has loved once." A sudden blade of cold slashes its way, metaphorically, through Glen's chest, from heart to groin. "Not even once."

There's a tension that Glen can feel in the other man, but it's nothing like what compresses him into a frozen fetal curl. "Well. He's my son. I'm a grown man. I'm supposed to have loved." The gnawing in his mind tells him it's futile to hide from this dragon.

"So often? So freely?"

The blue eyes cower behind the needling explosion that answers. "This isn't about whom I've fucked! You know nothing about me. How do you know anything? Each one meant something! We should be talking about Siber and Damien and how the hell you pulled that off with Tetra. You're basically a pedophile, you know, if you did the things with him he thinks he did with her." Trying, desperately, to move the conversation. Confused that he can't.

"Nothing excites you anymore."

"Tell that to my boxes of Kleenex." His voice is like trying to drown out the ocean with nails and a hammer.

"Each special one is in a soup of special ones. And you. You make them special." Not heartless. Not cruel. Just... true. And terrifyingly familiar. "After the fact."

"Yeah, well, there's no changing that, so why hurt me like this? You fucking asshole."

"There's Damien." Wind is furious around them, because it doesn't know what to do with them. They're untouchable - the dragon because he doesn't feel the need to be, Glen because he can't be, except by the creature already touching him.

"What about him? Live vicariously through my own son's virginity? That's cheap. That's disgusting. I hardly even know who he is. Why are we even talking about sex?"

"You've been watching him for a decade, Glen, but not doing anything. While Siber went mad, you decided just to forget, about everything. How long has it been since you were with him?"

"Like that fucking matters! God DAMN it, Farlan!"

"Ah." That simple word, so soft, blankets the landscape and seems to muffle the stars themselves. Embarrassed by its cackling, the stream quiets down, waiting for the next words. "So you do remember me."

"Of course I do." Said through tears. Real tears. Because he hadn't, until the core of his fears had been cracked into by that steady, moving mountain of the dragon's words. "The ideal. The dream. The dragon. The impossible. But how? Who cares? I'm a grown man and I've already fucked up. I can pretend. I can dance with Damien and chatter about the bullshit I think I know, but it doesn't stop the fact that I've just... I've... I've given away everything, to everyone, because none of them were you."

"The improbable. And Glen." A scaled hand reaches behind to grasp at Glen's trembling, pale skin. "You haven't given it all away. And the past is gone."

"No, it's not," he spits in whisper.

"It is. And there's Damien."

"It is not. The past is crystallized in memory. The past is ever the present, and won't stop being the future until I'm dead."

"With an attitude like that, it certainly won't." There is, somehow, a grin to the words.

"How can you always be so much better than I am?" Memories of Farlan, with him, with Siber, flood through him. The wars, the dancing, the singing, all whipping through his head. What all of it had meant to him, and the gradual removal of himself from it, when the wolf-man began to go mad, and he lost track of the dragon. He stands the tide, not a creature to fall to his metaphorical knees for a mere mid-life crisis.

"You just have to stop, Glen. You have to let go. You keep moving, always..."

"And how can you know? How can you know everything?" Interrogative Socratic bullshit.

Farlan sighs and answers anyway. "The dragons have existed a very long time. We're always there."

"So you know what I've done as well as I do. Who I am. What I believe, what I don't believe. Not like it matters. I don't believe in bullshit anymore. I'm not allowed to. I'm hardly allowed to believe in reality. I'm a scientist."

"Allowed to believe," Farlan snorts. "Like that's a thing."

"It IS!" Glen roars, thundering his obstinacy like a herd of horses.

But Farlan is untouchable, even to the wind from another's voice. "It isn't, for Damien."

"What does that even mean? He's a child! A little boy. Of course he believes in things he's not allowed to believe in. What are you doing with my son?"

"I sent both of them to the breaking point, and then forced them to be with one another. Either Damien will go back to being a child and Siber will relinquish the comfort he takes in thinking he lost something so that he can come back to reality, or they'll kill one another." A stampede of honesty. And then more Socratic bullshit. "So... what will you do, then?" Glen can feel the dragon leading him. He hates it.

"What do you mean? Figure I'll go back to convincing myself I love the people and things I don't and fucking them and forgetting as much of the past as I can. Nothing else to do. 'specially if they're dead." Bitterness like a knife, but dulling as his energy flees him.

"I mean... will you tell Damien there are things in which he can and can't believe? Tell the only hybrid human, dryad, and wolf-man that has ever existed that there are things that can't work? Snuff out the only light in generations, because you're an 'old man'? Come on, grandpa," he teases. He stretches his wings with false nonchalance, and Glen leans harder against them to feel that potential for flight all the better. "You're better than that. Besides, maybe I want to add a little dragon to the mix. Maybe I want him to be everything."

"Hm. 'Better than that.' I doubt it."

Farlan finally just elbows him in the ribs, hard. It promises future bruises, the color of Siber's fur. "I think you are," he says, his voice not having changed even a little. "Be the adult, though. Raise your demon child. Let him grow to save the world. I just spent nine very tiring weeks teaching him he can be a little kid, and now he has the chance to be one. Don't screw it up for me, yah?"

Anger has taken the fight out of Glen, and a sinking depression is what remains. The dragon's refusal to back down lifts his spirits at least by an iota, though. "So... you do all this protecting. All this guiding." He leans his head back, until his skull is touching his old friend's. "I want you to know... even if I haven't been stable, haven't been pure..." His chest threatens to clench, but he snorts away the weakness. No place for weakness in a dragon's compatriot. "I will be here for you. Like I was before. I swear it."

"I know," Farlan smiles, gratitude suffusing the words.

There are a few moments of stillness, and then Glen asks, "Why the ten years? Why let him be so dormant for so long? That must have been hell for him."

"I needed ten years," comes a whisper. Its softness makes Glen finally turn his head, and he meets the dragon's golden eye with one of his own. "I needed ten years to make you write this."

They both go back to watching the night after that, fingers interlaced at their sides, silent in the world. The fog of their argument lifts, clarifying the heavens and bringing the world back into focus. A chill wind wraps around them in a unifying embrace that makes neither of them shiver, and man and dream reunite in harsh, black, and beautiful reality.

The boy and the wolf sleep for a short time after their meal, but only that short respite is allowed. The Black arrive, as they always will, when there is emotion on which to feed. Why they did not come earlier will remain a mystery, but they find Siber and Damien wrapped up around one another, sated in many ways, and do not hesitate. The wolf awakens in just enough time that the incoming glaive only shreds a wing instead of bisecting the pair. He doesn't scream. He picks up his ebony sword from the ground and lashes out, felling three before even taking stock of the situation. Damien darts up a tree, terrified, but aware he cannot fight the Black. The crack of snapping trees rips through the air as Siber works, but the tide of Black keeps coming, and in the dusk, the Black have the advantage.

"Come." Siber flees and Damien follows through the canopy. Black climb up them like spiders and lash out at his feet and legs. Siber takes blows from all sides that open him up and dig the poison deep into his veins. There are too many, too quickly, and more than have ever appeared for so few people before. The world around them is silent... silent as the grave. Venom eats through the woods and grasses and leaves, but the world has no interest in making noise in this deathscape. Blood flows freely from both of those fleeing until they both reach the empty hillside where sit Farlan and Glen. The four exchange glances, and when Damien leaps down from the treetops, Siber throws him to Glen, who catches him in one arm, sets him down, and hands him the assault rifle. The boy immediately drops to one knee, panting and swallowing moans. Glen holds his fifteen-pound digging stick and readies himself for the onslaught that is following Siber out of the trees.

Farlan stands, spreads his wings, and with a nervous squeeze of Glen's hand, sets his stance and barks a command into the stillness. Like the sound that showed Damien what silence truly meant, it hushes everything that is making noise: it silences the Black. As with Siber's sudden buzzing of wings, they simply evaporate. Dozens, scores, hundreds of them that have made the landscape behind them desolate, simply vanish into the gathering night, and as Siber stumbles into a ragged heap near them, Farlan shivers and leans against Glen for support.

The winds start with an uncertain susurrus, but hush again as the three adults look at Damien. He has collapsed, Black poison clogging his bloodstream, and he whimpers in pain and confusion. The older wounds in his back and chest have gone jet and scarlet with the verdant already there. The whimpers crescendo into a cry.

Siber growls and struggles to his feet, then grabs the boy by his neck and begins dragging him. Farlan and Glen watch. Will they save one another, or kill one another? In a rage, the wolf leans the puling boy up against the same rock he had rested against so many weeks ago, still holding his neck, that umbilical tie to the world, and pushes his lips to Damien's forehead. Then, he presses himself against the stone, spreads the remains of his wings around the boy until nothing can be seen of him, and goes still, and turns to amber, as fossilized as his eyes.

The remaining two just watch, for hours. This is new magic - invented, to save the life of a child. The stars twinkle, but they don't giggle. The moon spins her way across the heavens, for once neither bitter nor envious nor vain. The winds blow. The grasses grow. The water flows.

The sun begins to rise.

"That took a lot out of me, Glen." Farlan is still leaning against him, in the quiet gray. The human stands strong, furious he was ineffectual in battle, but glad he can at least stand guard for the rest. "I need to recover. Do you have a place I can stay?"

"Odd question for someone who's been in hiding for his whole life. But yeah, of course. I always have room for you."

"Good, good. I want to... at least see this part with my own eyes."

"Part? Your own eyes?"

A groaning sound of creaking stone issues from the gargoyle Siber has become. A blue breath of wind gusts out of it. Without ceremony or more preamble than that, it detaches from the stone and rolls ponderously, loudly, into the brook. Damien is nowhere to be seen. A crack forms along its side, which spiderwebs across its surface until it crumbles to dust and begins to be carried away by the stream. Glen refuses to allow that to happen, in case that's all that's left. He stoops, gathers a handful of the stuff, and shoves it in his pocket. He will not allow Siber to dissolve.

As the mound that remains is blown away by the whispering wind and the still bubbling brook, a shape is revealed. Pure white, purer than snow. The shape of a young boy, but not - the shape of a wolf-man, but not. More amber sand is eroded away, and a huge, deep, violet lily, dug into the creature's spine, shows itself. A long, white tail is soon soaked by the stream, and purple eyes slowly open to the dawn. It's a new creature. The creature stands quickly and shakes itself off, looking around.

"Where's Siber?" he asks. It's the boy's voice, but his form has changed. He's in between... everything. His body is strong, but carries the androgyny of youth. His fur is shorter than a wolf-man's, but is still fur. His muzzle is shorter than a wolf-man's, but still a muzzle. The flower on his back seems to bloom even more eagerly at the touch of the sun's rays, but it doesn't hurt him - the magic of the earth is adapted to him.

In the very recognizable voice of Tatrix, Farlan answers with a smile, "Oh, he's here... in spirit. Spirit. Quite literally, actually." The image of a cobalt hound imposes itself on the stream for a split second. "But I doubt he'd want that name, anymore. He's not... proud of how he's carried it, recently."

Without hesitation, the boy answers, "Then I'll take it. I don't want my name anymore, either. Too much has changed."

"Oh good; that simplifies things. It'll make it way easier for you to get to know your father, I think." He taps Glen's shoulder. His voice is so tired - ten restless years tired. "I'm going to rest, then, and Glen here said he'd take care of me."

"Wait," the man tries to halt him. "That sounds fatalistic; what are you doing?" Without an answer, though, Farlan shimmers and fades, and the coruscating energy of it surges into Glen's back, between his shoulder blades, from where Siber's flower is growing. A black tattoo forms there - one of a dragon, of course. Glen is thrown to his knees, and tears are flung suddenly from his eyes as he feels that being, that responsibility, that purification, that dream, embedded in him anew. He has a second chance.

Siber, the boy, approaches him and meets his eyes. "Dad?"

Sapphire to amethyst, Glen answers him. "Apparently." He wipes at his eyes, then drops his staff and pulls the warm, fuzzy child against him with both arms in a ferocious hug, not knowing any other method of reconciling the shocks of the past hours. Siber clings to his bare chest, just as silent, while a prelude begins around them in the world. "Bah. Let's get breakfast - I'm dying."

"Sibe..." He searches for a new name, hoping it's the right one, since he doesn't know where the wolf has gone. "Sibrah's still alive, right?"

"In a way. I've got some tests to run to figure out what happened to him. You can help. After breakfast." The world moves on.

"And where's Tatrix?"

"He's resting. He'll be back, I swear. Come on. Let's, uh. Let's get you home." They stand and gather their implements, then gather the clothing that has been shed and walk back to town.

The river chuckles as the rising rays of sun dance along its surface. The winds rise in a gentle, bittersweet moan at Sibrah's passing. The trees sing quietly, chattering a soft percussion to the wind's murmuring, and morning's warmth begins its anthem.