Jackal Among Snakes

The moon.

Long ago, it’d been transformed as a result of Lorena’s bargain with the Heralds. They used Sophia’s power of creation to create something of an isolated habitat for the lunar dragons. It couldn’t be compared to the moon that Argrave had known, by all accounts. Most prominently, it had something of a protective atmosphere, permitting life from their planet to persist. It had taken Argrave and Anneliese well over thirty years of study—the bulk of which had come in the past four years—to settle upon the idea that colonizing the moon might be possible.

Anneliese, Argrave, and a small cabal of researchers had been endeavoring to that end for a very long while. It was an idea born of Argrave’s whimsy, which eventually consumed Anneliese until her passion for the project overtook his own. The vast infinity of space appealed to her innate curiosity. Argrave just thought it was a cool idea, and enjoyed working with his wife.

Argrave hadn’t ever expected it to be something actionable. Now that the day had finally come, he was filled with a sensation he hadn’t experienced in well over ninety-seven years. It was nostalgic, almost. Confronting the impossible. Tackling uncertainty. As emperor and empress, uncertainty rested in the quality of their solution. Now, they weren’t even certain if what they were attempting was possible.

Just like it used to be.

“What was that?” said Anneliese.

Argrave was brought back to the present, and he looked right. Anneliese sat on a chair, looking out across the coast. They were waiting for their ride to arrive. It was a strangely mundane thing, this journey to space of theirs. In time, their people could develop vessels that bridged the gap on their own. Until then, why not take advantage of the already-available dragons?

“Did I say that out loud?” Argrave shifted in his chair.

“Mumbled it,” she answered.

“It’s just like it used to be,” he clarified.

Anneliese’s face scrunched. “Is it? Lives aren’t in the balance.”

“Who says there aren’t?” Argrave crossed his arms. “We’ve avoided war as best we could, but… there’s only so much we can do before things can’t be contained, controlled. Even some of our own children think it might be wise to head overseas, claim new territory for the Blackgard Union. If we can do this… can’t we prolong the peace?”

“Prolong, maybe. Stop altogether? Never.” Anneliese said, shaking her head wistfully. “Conflict is inevitable. I’ve come to peace with that fact. Someday, war will come, either from within or without.”

“Hmm.” Argrave fell into thought. “It’s funny. You can’t stop worrying about our more-than-grown children, while you’ve moved on from the Blackgard Union. Whereas I…”

“…can’t stop worrying about the Union, while you’re ready to let your children strive alone.” Anneliese smiled.

Some people thought it strange that they could hold opposite positions, yet still not fight amongst each other. Respect of the other and total trust eroded all of their differences as soon as they arose. True kinship, Argrave felt, couldn’t be broken down because the other held differing thoughts. What few disagreements they had only helped to refine the nuance of their own beliefs. Because they truly respected the other, they realized the other had come to their beliefs for a good reason.

“What do you actually want to do on the moon?” Argrave wondered.

Anneliese studied him peculiarly. “How long have we been talking about precisely that?”

“No, I mean…” Argrave shook his head. “The stuff that comes after.”

“Start a garden on my own,” Anneliese said decisively, knowing precisely what he meant without him needing to elaborate further.

“Hmm.” Argrave nodded, thinking of his older relatives who’d done precisely that. “Grandmotherhood becomes you.”

“And you?” Anneliese ignored his joke, leaning in closer.

“Got this image in my head, clear as a movie.” Argrave paused, finding the words. “It’s a whole day. We bring the kids up to the moon, wow them. We play catch. Come evening, we go to our little moon hut. You check on your garden while I cook us a meal of moon food.” ṝ𝓪ƝȪ𝐁Ë𝘚

“Moon food?” Anneliese repeated.

“Yeah,” Argrave chuckled. “You know—animals, plants, all brought up on the moon. We serve the meal, and—”

“And it’s terrible, because you can’t cook,” Anneliese interrupted with a playful smile on her face.

“And it’s terrible,” Argrave agreed, leaning in until his face was right beside hers. “Though you would all smile and say it’s great because you love me, and then you’d tell me the hurtful truth later when I least expect it.”

Anneliese scoffed. “I wouldn’t need to tell you. You can taste for yourself.”

Argrave suppressed his laughter and continued, “And then the kids would go home to their parents, and we’d go to bed. You’d complain about my habit of stealing the blanket while we sleep, and I’d propose reasonable solutions that you never seem to like. Then, with perhaps a few twists and turns, we’d fall asleep together. Just like we have every day, almost, for the past ninety-seven years.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“It’s quite the mundane day,” Anneliese said musingly before she kissed his cheek and leaned back in her chair. “I love it.”

Argrave leaned back as well. “That’s our shtick, isn’t it? Putting ourselves in difficult situations, then trying our damnedest to get out of them so we can enjoy mundanity.”

“Only to find ourselves ill-suited for it,” Anneliese added.

Argrave grunted in agreement as he listened to the quiet crashing of the waves. “I’ll miss this place, a little.” Anneliese agreed with a light grunt, just as he had. He turned to her once more. “How do you think it ends?”

“Life?” Anneliese focused her amber eyes.

“No. Our journey.” Argrave crossed his arms. “I thought this was our end. We’d spend our next millennia in that estate, reaping the benefits of compound interest. But now we’re leaving. We’re moving again, walking the path.”

“I think it only ends when we do,” Anneliese said, all too deliberately.

“And will we survive forever?” Argrave asked, a hidden question laced into the words.

Anneliese didn’t speak immediately. “We survived Enrico’s murder. The blame, the misery, the grief. I can’t see what could split us apart by this point.”

They both went silent for a long, long while. Eventually Argrave offered his hand, and she took it firmly.

“Maybe we could start a moon family, separate from this planet’s family.” Argrave looked at her stone-facedly. “We could have team battles. You know, competitions. See which family is better.”

Anneliese—who’d grown hardened callouses to his jokes after their many decades—broke into laughter at the absurdity of his proposal coupled with his entirely stoic demeanor. She nearly tamed her laughter after a dozen seconds before it claimed her again, and she twisted out of her chair in the uproarious mirth that followed. Eventually her laughter broke Argrave, too, and he joined her on the sandy beach until they both had tears in their eyes.

Anneliese sat back on her chair, massaging her cheeks which already felt somewhat sore from smiling. “I’ll consider it,” she finally answered back, nearly beginning another laughing fit.

A familiar sensation drew both of their eyes. They turned their heads in time to catch Lorena appearing from the skies, alighting on their island with a gentleness that her speed didn’t suggest. Argrave and Anneliese were sobered by the arrival of their space taxi, and the two of them stood to go greet the leader of the lunar dragons, Lorena.

They saw Raven dismount from Lorena’s back. Raven had settled on a mortal form of his own—that of gray hair and gray eyes, standing a shade taller than his wife Lorena as she morphed from her draconic form to a mortal one. Raven didn’t carry a shadow of either the Smiling Raven or the Alchemist. Rather, Lorena had brought him peace during their struggles over the years to keep their relationship stable.

“All of the people you instructed we bring are being ferried over as we speak,” said Lorena, foregoing pleasantries. Her personality hadn’t changed much—playful, straightforward, compassionate. “All that remains are you two newly-minted lunatics. Are you having a change of heart, laughing so deliriously?”

“Not at all,” Argrave rebutted immediately. “We’re eager to be off.”

“That’ll die in you quickly,” said Raven. Even if he’d changed a great deal, his cynicism remained sky-high. “You’ve likely grown soft, living so decadently in this palace.”

“We could find out if I’ve gone soft right now, Raven.” Argrave proposed with a cheeky grin. “Both ways, in fact.”

Lorena flicked the back of Raven’s head, and he looked at her annoyedly. “I’m too young to be a widow,” she reprimanded her millennia-younger husband. “Said your goodbyes, all that?”

Argrave put his arm around Anneliese. “We’re as ready as can be.”

Lorena nodded, then turned around. Her form slowly shifted to back to how it had been—the gigantic, dominant red dragon, crowding up the island with its sheer size. Argrave and Anneliese walked up steadily and silently. Raven climbed up first, using Lorena’s spines as stairs, almost. They did the same until all came to sit on Lorena’s back. There, it had been morphed almost pleasantly to accommodate them, and they sat.

The following moments were unlike anything Argrave had experienced. The lunar dragons’ ability to cross space wasn’t high-speed travel, exactly—if it were, they could’ve simply crashed into Gerechtigkeit at full speed to kill him. Research into the matter revealed it to be a sort of spatial distortion, where the beating of their great wings quite literally distorted space in some manner. It, like so many other phenomena, wasn’t yet fully understood.

Perhaps they’d change that. Perhaps they’d adapt that into vessels of the Blackgard Union’s make. That, like so many other objectives, was one of their goals.

The journey itself felt impossibly brief. In one moment, they stood at the beach. In the next, the clouds were passing them by, and a wave of stars just after them so myriad and mobile it looked like a meteor shower. There was an infinitesimally brief moment of suffocating vastness—the grip of the vacuum of space, perhaps, or something more mystical—and then it was over.

And then they saw it. The endless redness, marked by craters like pockmarks on its surface. Like a sea of red chalk, or an endless mesa of red sandstone. From so high up, he could see its curve—the horizon, so clear and different Argrave felt his head lurch to accept it. And when he looked up… Argrave saw their planet, his planet. The blue oceans, the white clouds, even the continents just barely visible past it all…

Words could hardly do what he felt justice.

Raven, either out of respect for their awe or simple lack of anything to say, remained silent as Lorena found a spot to land. And it was much appreciated. Just as they needed to adjust to the sights, the sensations, so too did they need to adjust to the mystic disruption. There was power here. Power different from that on the planet they’d left.

Lorena alighted on ground in front of a ramp descending into the moon’s surface. As she began to enter, Argrave and Anneliese looked out across the desolation of the moon. As he watched, only one thing came to mind.

“We’ve got a lot of damn work cut out for us,” Argrave said.

“That’s one way to put it…” Anneliese answered back.

“It might be impossible, bluntly put,” Raven added.

Argrave inhaled the moon’s air deeply, reveling in the harsh sensation and new, bizarrely sterile smells. “We’ll make it possible. We have to.”

Raven looked at him skeptically. “Do you?”

“Well, no,” Argrave conceded. “But I want to.”