[b]Ailee![/b]

It is Curiosity that stays the fires. Curiosity, vast and bottomless. Curiosity at this broken, malfunctioning toy. Curiosity at thinking it ever thought itself separate. His eyes are vast and molten gold, his pupils large enough to be doorways.

When King Dragon moves, it is wet. Terribly wet. He bleeds his self out into the world. Where he is not harder than steel and stone and hate, he sloughs. He arrays himself before you, his wings unfurling for the first time in untold years, and when he opens his jaws, poison sloshes out and runs in fiery rivulets down to your feet, down towards Surma who hangs back in the boat still.

“Welcome back,” he says to this reflection of his power, his might, his self. “Welcome back,” he says, his mouth a hole in the world that you could fall into forever. “Welcome back,” he whispers, and the Judgment falls on you like an anvil. That you are worth only what insight he may glean from you; that the fragment of his nature inside you is all that there is.

How dare he? There is only room for one queen in a hive, only room for one dragon in the world, because otherwise they will find their opposite out and fling themselves headlong together in a crushing embrace, thrashing, stinging, brutal, until only one remains.

And you, Ailee Sundish, are more than your self. The dragon nature roils and burns within you, here, where the essence of the King shines crimson from every surface, where he has extruded himself into the very fabric of the world, so pliable here. Only one! Only one!

Give him his death. Take his throne. Take the room to become your inner self, great and grand and red, red, red.