It had come this way many times but on the previous occasions it had moved swiftly, eager for the call of a new skin, dulled dreamlike by the alchemical potions of the little ones. This time it was awake. This time it remembered. How? How did you make a poison that lingered even with the dead?The dragon mused on that and then threw the thought away. It didn't move swiftly this time, but slowly. Carefully. Creeping among the ephemerals around it to the hole where the dead Earth Goddess and her slayer had held That Which Came Before at bay for so long. They were gone now and the hole was getting bigger and the Nothing was seeping through. The Nothing would kill more than dragons. The Nothing killed everything, annihilating all it touched. That was the nature of the Nothing. What it was called was what it was.The dragon Silence lingered at the edge that crept ever further, staring, reaching in with its senses.The Nothing. But its taste had a tang of the familiar nevertheless. The dragon dredged through ancient memories of its very first lifetime, hazy and dull from the centuries of alchemy it had suffered, until it found what it was looking for.
