A Scale of Sapphire

Matt

“Breathe Matt! You’re ok! It’s ok! Just breathe…”

There was blood on my hands. On my hands and my sword and my clothes and-

“Matt!”

Chelsea. She looked worried. I wanted to say something, to reassure her, but I couldn’t breathe. The shrieks, the cries, the sound of metal on metal. Metal on flesh. They cried when we hurt them. It was just like when mom died…

There was a hand on my shoulder, another brushing my hair out of my eyes. I breathed in. Then I breathed out. In and out, over and over and over again.

“I k-killed them… Chelsea, I killed them and they cried…”

“You did. We both did. They were monsters, Matt. If we hadn’t killed them, someone else would’ve, and if nobody did, they would’ve killed us.”

“But-”

“No buts! You’re not wrong for feeling this. They were people once, I’d be worried if it didn’t hurt, but they aren’t anymore, you know that! If they really were still people, if they really weren’t monsters, your mom would still be alive now, and your dad wouldn’t have turned into that… thing.”

I took a few more shuddering, gasping breaths, trying to take what she said to heart, trying in vain to steady myself. I had to do this, it was necessary and it was right, we’d been ordered by an angel, for fuck’s sake!

But my hands were warm and sticky and I didn’t think they’d ever feel clean again…

“Chel?”

“Yes, Matt?”

“Can we go home?”

“Yeah. Let’s… Let’s go home.”

Aoife

If I’m being completely honest, I wasn’t feeling great about our odds. I wasn’t the first moon, Cyrus wasn’t the first sun, and every other moon dragon in history had lost, badly. The only exception was when the two dragons fell in love, and that ended with magic being sealed away for a thousand years, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a win.

I’d told the others, of course, and while it took them a little while to accept that my dreams are real sometimes, they’d eventually been convinced of the truth. That being said, those revelations didn’t actually change much in our day to day lives. Cass was back to training with the angel’s sword, Ethan just kept sulking, and the Fletcher’s kept avoiding me. I continued to spend most of my nights with my girlfriends (I have girlfriends!!!!) and most of my days out hunting or scouting, and that was that. The fact is, even though we were all committed fully to protecting ourselves and beating Cyrus, we had yet to come up with any kind of real plan to bring him down. His presence was stronger than mine, by a mile, and that made it tough to even lift a finger against him, and even if we did, he healed almost faster than we could hurt him, and all that’s without even mentioning his village. Even if you included Ethan and all the non sentient plants that Willow could control, we were easily outnumbered two to one, assuming his village hadn’t grown, which it most certainly had.

No matter how you look at it, we’re screwed.

“Hey babe, you’re spiraling again.”

Suddenly the world snapped back into focus. We were at the dinner table, and Willow was perched on the table’s edge. Apparently, she could read mi-

“And no, I can’t read minds, Aoife. You’re just really easy to read.”

Erica snorted.

“She’s not wrong!”

I wasn’t convinced.

“I just- I have no clue how to fix this. I have no idea how we could possibly win, y’know? And I feel like I’m just dragging everyone into my mess. Dealing with Cyrus is my responsibility, my destiny. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Well hear me out,” Erica was speaking around mouthfuls of fresh greens, courtesy of Willow. “You’re our girlfriend, so your problems are our problems by default. Besides, helping you kick that sunny bastard’s ass is a volunteer gig. Everyone’s here because they want to be. Ok?”

“And besides,” Willow now. I was being ganged up on, this wasn’t fair! “I’ve actually been working on something with Crab Apple to help!”

Erica

It would turn out the “help” Willow had mentioned was a kind of long ranged detection system made from plants. It was a concept she’d initially drafted when she was contemplating how to find Aoife, but she hadn’t had enough time to set it up before. The idea was to use magic to facilitate more efficient communication through plants across a wide area, that way you could ask every plant in a several mile radius whether they sensed what you were looking for all at the same time. The only issue was that such a detection system needed a sentient plant to act as its core and coordinator, and it needed vast quantities of magic to create, along with a sizable investment of magic every day to maintain.

Basically, it sounded like a pain in the ass to do.

It would seem though, that Willow had committed herself to doing it. From the moment we settled down here, she’d been investing her magic into Crab Apple, bit by bit, until they’d become the kind of core Willow needed. After that, more and more magic had been allowed to trickle into the expanding system of underground connections until it spanned our whole little village, then the area around the village, and further and further and further each day. After weeks and weeks of effort, yesterday, Crab Apple had given her the news she’d been waiting for: the communication and detection network now spanned a radius of roughly twenty miles. It was time to try it out.

Willow led the two of us to the floral section of the village, taking care to remind the carnivorous plants who their friends were.

There was a reason Aoife and I didn’t often visit, after all.

Eventually we reached them. Crab Apple the sentient thistle was now easily the size of a bus, a chaotic and beautiful mess of tangled leaves and thorns, all straining towards the fading sunlight as night fell.

“Crab Apple, are you ready to give this a try?”

I couldn’t tell what their response was, obviously, but I could feel when it happened. There was a massive wave of rustling, as though a powerful gust of wind had rolled through, but the air was dead calm. Willow laughed, blushing slightly.

“You’re too sweet, Crab Apple. Thank you! They uh… they really do!” She smiled back at Aoife and I. Oh? “A-anyways, let’s do this!  Ahem! Can you ask the network if they’ve detected any fauna that communicate via words like Erica, Aoife, and I do?”

Another wave of rustling, this time accompanied by a proper gust of wind. I could hear the trees creaking and groaning around us as a powerful chill began to fill the air. A quick glance towards Aoife revealed that she was just as bewildered as I was. Willow’s eyes went wide for just a moment, and then she was falling. Before she or I could react though, Aoife had suddenly appeared at her side, gently lowering her to the ground. In moments, I was with them as well, kneeling beside them both. Willow wasn’t unconscious, so that was good, her open eyes were flicking wildly about though, as though she was in a dream. Soon, a few seconds after she fell, the rapid eye movements stopped, and she smiled gently at the two of us.

“I think it worked!”