Dragonslayer, Inc.
Chapter XXIII- Life and All It Brings

Third Twilight

It had been about a day since we made our pact. The bottom of the sun was starting to touch the horizon.

We hadn’t moved, not even to get food. The last meal we ate was breakfast, and that was brought to us by Machen. He was confused as to why we didn’t get up. “One of you can get up,” he said, “and the other can stay with her. It makes sense. You don’t both need to stay put.”

But we wore him down, and he gave us our meal. It wasn’t much, but we didn’t need a lot. Traveling requires energy, but we weren’t traveling, so we didn’t need a lot of energy. It was good just to get food into my mouth, to chew on it and swallow it, to absorb sustenance.

Machen wasn’t nearly as pleased. Leaving us to our meager meal, he said, “We’re running low on supplies: food, water, you name it. I’m worried. We need to restock. Hopefully, we can do that in Miyok. When are we leaving?”

“Tomorrow,” said Ironwall, assembling a façade of professionalism.

“What?” responded Machen.

I laughed at the tone of his voice. He sounded like the old Machen more every day. I was confident he was recovering, and he was, though not to the extent I thought then. A hope rose in my stomach that he could somehow come out of this journey as a better and stronger person, and if he could, why couldn’t I?

Then I thought of the return trip and shuddered. What was I thinking? There was no way we were gonna make it home. Whether we were better people or not, we were gonna be dead people before long.

This thought festered in my mind. I yearned for the days when I didn’t think like this, which seemed so very far away. Attempting to distract myself, I took control of the conversation, saying to Machen, “We’re staying with her today. She needs it.”

“Not you too, Coran. I don’t know what the best way to help her is, but it’s not this. In fact, I think…” He trailed off once he realized we weren’t buying what he was selling. “Or we could stay here. That works too.” The energy faded from his face, and he slunk away.

By the middle of the day, it was scorching hot- over ninety degrees. Globs of sweat dripped from my body, each landing with an audible pop. Ironwall, who was more thermally resistant, asked, “You’re not gonna die, are you? We can go to camp if it’s that dire.”

“It’s not,” I said, shrugging and removing my shirt. “I’ve sweated worse than this.”

“She’s freezing cold.”

“Really?”

“What? Do you not believe me?”

“Don’t get defensive.” I tried to touch her forehead, but Ironwall slapped my hand away.

“Don’t do that,” he said curtly. “Unless you want to crush her skull.”

“My mistake.” I sat on my hands. “Say, what do you think she’s feeling?”

“Not much, I hope. At this point, death would be a release.” I have never heard so much despair in a person’s voice. He tried to pretend he was talking about a person on the news, a person he didn’t have a connection with, but he was failing miserably.

“Then let’s hope for her release.”

“Don’t be blasé.”

“I’m not. I was being poetic. …I was trying at least.”

“Put her out of her misery then. Save her from suffering.”

“You do it. She’s your friend.”

“I can’t.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“Maybe this trip will kill me,” he said. “Maybe it’ll kill us both. Maybe it’ll kill Stephanie and Machen too. Maybe none of us will survive. Maybe we’ll fail in our quest to kill the dragon. But we won’t have to endure what she’s going through.”

When the sun set, the aunt-like Slayer was still alive, though she was nearing her last breath. “That was our last day as five,” I said.

“I don’t know what to add to that.”

“Nor do I.”

We were severely sleep-deprived. Our skin was dingy, and there were dark circles around our eyes. It was like we were the products of cross-breeding between zombies and vampires. Our hair was rough and sticky, and our hands were shriveled and clingy. My soaked clothes hung from my body like it was a clothesline, and his mouth seemed in danger of dripping off his face.

It would only have been a matter of time until we collapsed, our bodies superseding our minds. I like to think it would have happened to both of us at the same time.

After searching for a sentence to lodge into his droopy mouth, he said, “They’ll be more food for the four of us.”

“Don’t pretend that makes you feel better.”

“I won’t.”

“What’s your favorite memory of her? Do you have one?”

“I’m sure I do, somewhere in the recesses of my mind.”

“Was it the first time you met her?”

“That’s good one. That’s a real good one. But it’s not the best. It can’t be.”

“Then what is?” I insisted.

“Yesterday I could have given you an answer. Today I can’t. I don’t want to think about her. I know that’s despicable, but what can I say? The thought of her brings me to tears. It brings me crashing down on myself, and I don’t want that. I want to stay strong.”

“It’s okay to break down.”

“Not here. Not for me. You wouldn’t understand. I’m not sure I do.”

Twilight came. I welcomed it like an old enemy. It was only now that I began to think of this chapter of my life in terms of three twilights.

The aunt-like slayer was growing fundamentally weaker. I could hardly hear her breathing. “She’s almost there,” I said like she was running a race or taking a test.

“Oh.”

“Is there anything you want to say to her before she passes?”

“What’s there to say? It’s not like she can hear me.”

“I guess not,” I said noncommittally.

“The past is the past. …Why did I say that? I hate that saying. It’s so hollow. The past isn’t just the past. It’s more than that. It’s… it’s… I don’t know.”

“Is there anything you want to say to me? I don’t know why there would be, but…”

“Never… never hide who you are.”

“Huh?”

He acknowledged my confusion but did not respond to it. I tapped my fingers, twiddled my thumbs, and tried to think of something to say. The anxious melancholy was crushing me. Ironwall accepted it, but I don’t know how.

I felt like my body was being disintegrated, and my soul was running away to escape the same fate. My identity was being lost under the pressure. Stuttering and giving slight remarks were my ways of fighting this, but they weren’t enough, not nearly enough. Frantic, I searched for a topic of conversation that could stop this steamroller.

Then I didn’t need to.

A gasp lashed out from the aunt-like Slayer’s body. It was wicked and baleful and skin-crawling. A flock of hardy asphas had been lounging on a faraway ledge. I wasn’t aware of them until they flew away, and I was only aware of their flying away because it was so direct and flustered. They thought they were in danger, and they wanted to leave as quickly as possible. They were afraid for their lives. Neither my mind nor my heart could comprehend how the charming, sweet, unfailingly kind woman I had come to almost know over the course of this journey could produce such a demonic scream.

It was her last breath.

Ironwall checked her pulse, but he didn’t need to. He knew. He knew from the sound she made. He knew from looking at her. He knew from gingerly tapping her skin.

A veil of silence descended over the land, as if her infernal shout had consumed all other noises. I tried to break it by slapping the ground, but I couldn’t hear the sound I made. My ears weren’t ringing, but there were blockades nonetheless. I tried to talk to myself, but I couldn’t hear the words I was saying.

She was dead. I didn’t know her. I wished I knew her, but I didn’t, but it hurt anyway, and it hurt badly. I clutched at my stomach, which was throbbing like an out-of-control heart.

“Do you remember when I told you Ironwall wasn’t my real name?”

I could hear him. This gave me a shot of what would have been happiness on a better day.

“Yes,” I said without meeting his gaze. “I remember.”

“My real name is Taurus.”

“Taurus.” I tested the word out on my lips a couple times. “Like a bull?”

“Like a bull,” he confirmed, nodding.

A sick smile unfolded on his face. It was unhealthy and eerie, but it was a smile. I slapped the ground. I could hear the sound I made. I could hear the wind. I could hear the buzz of the bugs. I could hear my thumbs brush again and again against the tips of the other four fingers on their respective hands.

The self-sustaining silence had been broken.

“Tell me more,” I said, and I knew he would comply.

“Ezek is the site of my greatest failure as a Dragonslayer, a leader, and a human being. I am the reason it is ruins.” He stopped, tightly closing his mouth, as if to stop secrets from spilling out. In his mind, he considered whether or not to tell me, but before he could come to a decision, the fact of the aunt-like Slayer’s death hit him full-force for the first time. Grief took him over, and he dropped his resistance. He opened his mouth and continued, “We had been traveling together for months before we reached Ezek. A lot had been said and done. A lot of bonds had been made and lost. We had tracked the dragon here and there, but it kept flying away before we could fight it. Either that, or we fought it and lost. We were tired and weary, me especially. As we approached Ezek, we were getting close to the dragon, but our confidence wasn’t high. Even if we could catch and fight the dragon, what was to stop things from turning out the same as last time? It’s easier to fight dragons in a city, and there was only one city close to us.”

“I see where this is going.” My voice was empty. I was trying to absorb what he had said. While I spoke barely above a whisper, I’m sure he heard me because he sighed and wrung out his hands.

“We knew it was willing to attack Ezek. It wasn’t as destruction-happy as Icithan- you wore me down, I’ll use the name- but it had attacked the city before. It didn’t do much damage, but that attack caught the public eye. It’s the reason we were sent chasing it in the first place. As I said, Ezek wasn’t far away and there were no other cities in the region, so I came up with a plan to lure it there. We engaged the dragon on the plains to the west, then after ten minutes of fighting, ran east into the city. I told what was left of my group that we’d hide and wait for it to come. Two Slayers told me it wouldn’t work, but I never wavered and sure enough, it arrived, and what an arrival it made. I can still see its body blocking out the sun, casting the city in shadow. I can still see it landing like a meteor and setting off a minor earthquake. For the first time, a spark of conscience hit me. I realized the danger I had put these people in.”

“Taurus. Of course.” My voice was louder. “I knew I had heard that name before. It was in those papers I read in Ezek. They mentioned you a lot.”

“We could have fought the dragon anywhere, but we fought it in Ezek. Countless lives could have been saved had I not made that horrible decision. The battle was long and brutal and one-sided. It began at sunset and lasted three days before it ended right before morning twilight. We lost. The dragon- hurt but healthy enough to fly- went east, leaving behind a city that was no longer a city. Every hour of the battle, thousands of civilians died. That absurd story that every single person in Ezek died is pure fiction. To sensationalize takes away from the true horror. The truth is ninety-five percent of the population died. That comes out to over one and a half million people. I killed one and a half million people. Arge could have ruled for the rest of his life and not killed so many.”

“You didn’t kill them,” I said simply. “The dragon did.”

“You say that, but I’ve changed in your mind. I’m a villain now, an evil person. You can’t trust me anymore. You can’t look me in the eye. You’re afraid I’ll stab you in your sleep.”

“No.”

“It’s okay. I deserve it.” He held his neck in his hands and dug in his thumbs. “Do you know what sticks out to me most about that battle? How many different ways people died. There were hundreds. I used to know seventy-four, and I used to recite them to myself every night in the form of a poem. It was torture. I like to think I’ve moved past that, but snippets of that poem float through my mind every now and then, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. I’m thinking of one now actually. Let me sing it to you: Some died while trying to escape. Others died because they stayed. Some got stomped by a dragon foot. An old man suffocated in a pile of soot. A woman was thrown into a river. Her sister dove after her into the water. It’s not a good poem, I’ll admit, but it sticks your head. If I remember right, the entire poem was three hundred and forty-five lines. Many of these lines don’t directly relate to the seventy-four ways, but I remembered them anyway. They’re like me- they have no business existing, but they exist.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“That’s an accomplishment. Everyone else who knows this stuff about me despises me for it.”

“Even her?” I gently gestured to the aunt-like Slayer.

“I never told her. I never told anyone.”

“Only me?”

“Only you,” he said softly. “The only other people who know are in the five percent of Ezakian citizens who didn’t die. That’s a pool of eighty thousand people. Of them, maybe one percent suspects I’m responsible for luring that dragon into Ezek. That’s eight thousand people. A decent percentage of them wants to kill me.”

“Is that why you changed your name?”

“Yes. After Ezek was destroyed, those eighty thousand people had nowhere to go. Ezek was the last of the great Northern cities. The others had been abandoned before I was born. Smaller cities and towns stuck it out for longer, but they ran out of resources, and their residents moved to Ezek. Losing Ezek meant losing the North. Of those eighty thousand, over ten thousand stayed in Ezek. When supplies ran out, they fought, and they died. A hundred or so lived. The others didn’t. Their bodies are indistinguishable from the corpses of those who died during the dragon attack. As for those one hundred, and the other seventy thousand? I don’t know. My gut tells me most of them died, and my head tells me most of those who lived stayed north. Either that or they tried to go south and died on the way. If there were a whole bunch of them living in the South, the ‘Mystery of Ezek’ wouldn’t be that much of a mystery. There was next to zero chance of the name ‘Taurus’ being connected with anything nefarious. Why, then, did I keep the change? It made sense when I was traveling north, and there was a chance of meeting someone who wanted to kill me, but I needn’t have kept it, and yet I did. Why?”

“Because you wanted to leave the old you behind?” I offered.

“You tell me.”