-Interlude: Slaying-

The planet Arronai had not always been empty. It still wasn't, depending on how you looked at it. If you judged by sentient inhabitants, by thriving wild beasts, by ozone churning vegetation, then no, it was a dead planet. But if you just went by just life itself i its most basic forms- well, it was still dead.

Except just off the very southern tip of the Geniban continent, amidst the yellow mists of sulfur, within the churning auburn sea, there was the island of Norros, where the dragons lived- and so too the man who killed them.

Slayed. You didn't kill dragons. You slayed them. John was certain of only a few, terrible things, but this was one of them.

John was old. Impossibly old. Hadn't his mother told him that people didn't live this long? Hadn't he a mother? Sometimes he remembered. More often he remembered remembering and cursed the man he remembered himself. Without remembering why, of course, but old curses were bitter curses and John's were oldest of all.

Every muscle ached as John woke. They always did. As far back as he could... right. Memory. He was sick of it. Memory and the holes that it left. Wasn't it enough for him to be what he was now? John the Dragon Slayer. How might that have sounded to a bright eyed boy out to see the night sky and gaze at its wonders.

John's beard grazed the floor beneath him as he walked the cottage towards the kettle. Tea. Even Hell was not so cruel as to deny a man some staples. Hadn't there been something else? No, there was tea. Just tea. And dragons. All the dragons you could eat. But that was not a thought for breakfast. At breakfast you tried to forget the poor things, even has you chomped down upon them. It was hypocrisy. It was what made you human. And John was nothing if not human. This had been made clear to him extensively by... someone. There he was again, remembering. What a mockery of breakfast. John drained his tea and stood. The day began.

The trick was to start with the females. If you slayed primarily the females, you wound up killing fewer dragons in the long term. Maybe. It didn't feel that way. But someone had done the math years ago. Someone smart and someone who understood the necessity of the task- the necessity of John's place in it. Sometimes John still wondered what happened to him.

All the Dragons in the world fit into one coup. The coup, granted, was three miles end to end, but it was all the same coup. With the un-dome projecting the best artificial skies and sunlight and the fresh air into the facility, you could sometimes even pretend that it wasn't a dead planet that waited patiently outside.

John shrugged off his long, patched coat and stepped towards the datacore. Opening his eyes enough for the retinal scan to verify his identify- as if anyone else would live on this doomed, death-stained hell- he was greeted with the charge of the day. Six.

It would be a six dragon day, wouldn't it? It felt like one of them. No, all days felt the same these days. He just pretended differently in retrospect.

He didn't even allow himself a sigh as he entered the chamber. It was a shining metallic room. The same treatment which kept the blood from staining its surface also kept away most grime and tarnish that might have otherwise accumulated over the years. At the far wall was a bench. Above was a gate. John sat and waited.

The automated bell let out chime, signaling the first of the day. The gate clanged open and a bright green dragon flew lazily into the chamber. It was a small one, barely a hand long. It let out a tiny ball of fire in happiness, and came to sit on John's shoulder.

"Sree!" it cried, happily, its wings curling back as it rammed its nose into John's face.

"Hush now, little one," John whispered. Still, he couldn't keep from smiling. He put his finger on his shoulder and the dragon promptly perched upon it with tiny obsidian nails. He brought her down to face him.

"I think I'll name you Ophie," he said, stroking his long white beard thoughtfully. He never named two dragons the same. It was impolite. They were all different. All of them hatching forth into their tiny world, full of all the things they would ever know. Everything new and bright and interesting. It wouldn't do to call any of them the same thing. There had been many dragons though. It was sometimes hard to think of a new name. John hoped he didn't ever accidentally repeat himself. "You look like an Ohpie." He leaned in and whispered, "Don't tell anyone, but it's short for Ophelia." The dragon squawked and stretched it's wings in solemn promise.

"There's a good little dragon," John cooed and tickled the little creature in the soft spot between her long, coiled neck and her breastbone. Dragons went bonkers when you tickled them there. Ophie cried in sudden ecstasy as her neck shot out rigid and she released a chemical plume of highly flammable vapors. When he rang her neck, it was a quick and painless thing. He had done this for so long. He was very good at making it painless.

Ophie lay still on the floor, her scales draining of luminescence rapidly. The only consolation that John had was that, even now, he couldn't slay them without weeping- if only just a little bit. But he had liked Ophie. She had nudged him and taken his finger and had been gentle, as if she had been worried about the silly, old dragon slayer

He was still sobbing into his beard when the bell chimed a second time and the process began again.

There was a man waiting for John as he shambled back to his hut. Dark skin, a bald head, a long green coat, and the highest cheekbones John had ever seen. He wasn't smiling, which was only appropriate on Arronai.

"Has it been a hundred years already?" John asked, cocking his head.

"A hundred and a day," the man said. At his waistcoat was a cold iron pocket-watch. It swayed in the sulfurous breeze.

"Seemed longer," John admitted.

"Do you remember me?" the man asked. John looked behind him. There was a blue... something, standing against his hut. It didn't belong. None of them belonged on Arronai.

"No," John admitted. He remembered someone, maybe, sometimes, but it was never the dark man draped in green who now stood before him. Sometimes he remembered bright blue eyes and a girl- hadn't there been a girl?

"Do you remember why you're here?"

"No," John confirmed. "But I've done some thinking in the interim."

"Thinking is good," said the tall man. The watch kept swinging. If he shut his eyes, John could almost imagine it tick with each sway. John had nothing to say to this. Was thinking good? It was all he had. Thinking and slaying and all the time in the world to do them.

"The Dragons of Arronai," the man went on, looking up to the sulfur clouds. "Meant to soar the heavens, taking man to the skies in the final phases of the Gene Wars. Do you ever-" he looked to John and stopped. "No, of course you don't."

"They die so horribly," John whispered. He had seen what happened when he shirked his duty- when he pitied the poor dragons and took them to his hut. Wrenched, expanding gullets, internal explosions which wrenched out intestines but left their victims ceaselessly, horribly alive. It was not right.

"They were poorly designed," the man said. "Doomed to die the moment they are born. Their biology is a mess of organic napalm and hollow bones." The man looked at John, then to his hut, and nodded.

"There's a failsafe," he said, "on the coup. Execute command-"

"Zee, Zee, Plural, Alfa, Twenty-Eight, Fourteen," John finished for him. "It incinerates the coup, killing them all at once." The man's golden eyes widened in shock. Somehow, John found that his voice was stronger, his mind was clearer. What did it have to do with the cold, black watch, ticking endlessly in the back of his head?

"You knew?"

"I'm not stupid," John said. "Even now I'm not stupid."

"Then why haven't you..." the man began, softly.

"Ended them all?" John asked, caustic words bursting forth for the first time in a century. "Because it's not their fault. The poor dragons. They didn't ask for this. They just want to fly and love and be dragons. They deserve flight and all the life they can have in the three years before they're burst prone. They deserve names." He didn't know when it was that he started shouting.

"You slay them," the man said, his golden eyes narrowing. The sentence was somewhere between a call to reason and an accusation.

"One at a time," John shot back. Oh, how he hated this man. Why did he hate this man? They'd never even met.

The man sighed and turned to walk away. He vanished into the yellow mists. John could hear the creak of the blue house opening and the slam of it's door. He was alone. Quite right. He was-

The door opened once more. The man's green coat came swishing out of the mists. He was- there wasn't a word in John's vocabulary for what he saw in the man's eyes. With a sudden motion, he broke the chain on the cold iron watch and put it firmly in John's gnarled hand.

"Damn you," the man cursed. He breathed deep and coughed at the acrid air. Looking back to John, he hesitated. "When you're ready," he said, and walked back into the mists.

John stood with the black pocket-watch for some time. The ticking was stronger and, perhaps, picking up pace. He couldn't account for its weight. It would be such a simple thing to- No. John slipped the watch into his patched coat and walked towards his simple hut. There may be a day for that, but it was not this day. There was work to be done and the Dragons who needed him. He shut the door behind him and prepared for tomorrow's fresh hell.