He didn't know how long he had had the ring. Days, weeks, months, years. Time meant little anymore. Camphor could feel the ring growing impatient, and he could feel it working to exert its authority over him, knowing he wouldn't take it willingly. So far, so far, things had been manageable. He had been able to hold the ring at bay. He had been able to keep it at heel.

He knew it wouldn't last long.

He felt it reaching out, grabbing hold more frequently, more frequently, pushing and pulling, bullying him into positions he would regret later. He still balked at the prophecy. He still wanted to cut his finger off.

He tried every now and again. A wicked red scar had formed over his knuckles. Flesh wounds, scars, he could still get those. He couldn't lose his limbs. The bones wouldn't break.

And it still hurt.

"No, now stop, because that's the last time I'm going to tell you!" Faline shouted over the angry roars of her bondmate. The little green dragon - if any dragon can be counted little - raked the moss up with its right foretalon, glaring at her.

*Just try to stop me,* Quetz hissed at her, snapping a sharp and burn-scorched beak in her direction. It was something that had scared her the first months of their bonding, after she'd been assigned to take care of the abandoned, confused, angry little green fire dragon. It was still bigger than she was. He could still maul her to pieces. But she'd learned that, in being his bondmate, he felt what she felt, her pain was his pain.

The reverse was also true.

Faline wasn't in the mood to take any nonsense. She was in the mood to sleep. She grabbed firm hold of the frill by its jawline and yanked it over towards her. He winced (though it wasn't that hard of a pull), and she pulled him to press her cheek to his jaw.

"Let me get this straight."

*Yeah.*

"You're bored."

*Pretty much.*

"And therefore you want to burn down acres of forest."

*Yes. That's exactly it.*

Faline leaned over to his ear. "I DON'T THINK SO!" she shouted. "Now let's find dinner. And you can rotisserie that instead of everything in a FIVE MILE RADIUS." She pushed him away and glared at him, and Quetz wrinkled the skin on his beak.

*Fine,* the little dragon snarled. *But if I light you on fire on accident, it's your own fault.*

And thus, the logic of a defeated Quetz rose up, and Faline sighed and shook her head.

It's a funny thing, Tem thought bitterly as he guided himself with his staff, being an old man twenty years before your time.

He reflected, not for the first time, the series of events that had struck him blind, that had taken from him his position as Court Historian for King Ulric III of Elrichtiato his current placement as Wandering Storyteller-cum-Beggarman in Midgadria. A need for the truth was what the sudden demotion stemmed from, and he knew it. He also knew the risks going in. He also knew that, knowing how it was going to end, he'd still do it all over again.

And he would, because in ordering his favorite historian blinded and exiled, the king had drawn attention, more than Tem could ever have hoped to garner with his modest book, to the scandal coming to a head in the court.

The barons were not going to stand for it. Neither were the people. As such, Tem considered it a job well done, and his sight and homeland a worthy sacrifice.

Besides, no one here on the Western side of the Sierra Midgadria range knew the stories he had to tell. It made earning an honest living easy and relatively risk-free.

He still had some peripheral vision, more a curse than a blessing for how many times he had thought he saw something that never was, but it also let him see would-be attackers better than he thought he could. As it stood, Tem still didn't know if the incomplete blinding was the result of the sympathy or the utter incompetance of the man who performed it.

The cause, ultimately, didn't matter. Enough of his sight was gone that it made even the simplest tasks hundreds of times more difficult and taxing. He had to trust people implicitly, to develop an automatic sense of judgement on whether or not they were honest men and women.

He could own no land - documents needed to be read, regurgitated in understanding, and signed before witnesses for that. There was difficulty even in renting a room for a time.

In the long run, it didn't matter.

This was no longer the life he had worked so hard to achieve. This was a nightmare reality where his final end was not fame, a stable home, and herds of livestock. There was only one end here - anonymous death in a gutter.

Still, he felt a yearning in his heart. This could not be the end. There was no way. He had worked too hard, been too honest a man -- ... That was the prooblem, wasn't it?

He'd been an idealist in an age of corruption. He'd been too honest a man.

Unfortunately, he wasn't about to change now.

The fire burned like a beacon across the dark woods. Camphor knew it was where he was being led. His right arm ached with the pressure forced into it by the ring as it literally pulled him, stumbling, through the the night. There was no moon, and all that lit the woods was this campfire almost directly ahead.

It wasn't until he drew closer and heard the crackle, still distant, that he realized this was no campfire. It stretched high enough to kiss the treetops, and a few of the overhanging branches were smoking and glowing a dull orange. But it was spring, and there had been strong rains earlier this week. The trees would not burn in earnest.

He drew closer, still pulled by the ring, until he saw the figure of a person, a woman, he realized, as she walked around the blaze that loomed, twice her height at least.

He heard a rattling hiss, then, and stopped short. Surely he had found something he should not have.

He knew in his brain that there was nothing to fear; he had not failed a casket yet. Still, in his heart, fear flooded him from a sound that tried to shake the muscles free of his bones and strike the hair from his neck.

He watched the woman stop and throw her arms up in exasperation. "What do you call this?" she demanded.

The voice that answered echoed through his head with a sibilant rasp. *An intruder. Dinner.*

"You don't eat people." She drew near, and the fire surrounded her silhouette like an angry corona from the depths of hell.

*Anymore,* the voice answered indignantly.

The woman sighed, then turned more towards Camphor. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"I... I was told to meet you," he said, simplifying things as much as he could manage.

She cocked her head to the side and shrugged. "You're not from the Isle, are you? Because if you're here as some sort of social welfare--"

"What?" Camphor asked, puzzled.

Oh. I guess not." She shrugged again. "You're welcome to whatever part of the deer Quetz didn't devour or char beyond recognition. But I can't guarentee that there's anything in that category left."

The raspy hiss flooded Camphor's ears.

"I'll pass, thanks," Camphor admitted, thinking that this hissing voice in the blackness was getting old, and fast.

The woman shrugged a third time. "So if you're not from the Isle, who are you, and what do you mean you were sent to meet us?"

In this light, Camphor could make out her long brown hair, and the burn scars that smeared their ways across her face.

There was really no way to describe anything that he was or that had happened to him and still be considered sane, he realized after a moment.

"Fate seems to guide my life of late," he decided was safe enough. "And she seems quite insistant that I fulfill a prophecy I want nothing to do with."

The woman considered him for a long moment. "What do they call you?"

"Camphor," he said, feeling quite ill at ease during this entire meeting.

"Camphor what?"

"Just Camphor."

The girl continued to stare at him before shrugging. Again. "Very well. I'm Faline Untierecht. This is my bondmate, Quetzalcoatl."

A dragon's head emerged from the darkness, followed by massive claws. It coiled into view, also covered in burns and lacerations and old scars.

*I still say we eat him,* the voice hissed as the dragon snarled at him, *and leave his bones to roast.*

Faline rolled her eyes. "That's your answer to everything."

*Damned good answer.* Camphor realized that the dragon, for all its imposing personality, barely rose as tall as his own shoulder.

"So," Faline said conversationably, again ignoring her bondmate's nastiness. "Tell us about Fate and how she's thrust herself upon you."