Rush appeared looking haggard and forlorn in the darkness of Elsewhere near the soul space. He limped slowly toward his territory. Their territory. As the size of the sphere increased, so too did the density of mana within. It felt good as he stepped through. The mana that was expressly attuned to him and Ruth washed over his skin. The scorch marks and the scales that hadn’t been healing properly while he had been exploring Under Arch, or rather avoiding everything and everyone, began to knit back together at a noticeable rate.

“You’re back.” Arathan was there, perched in the nothing as if it were completely normal to be perched on an invisible, or rather, imaginary branch.

Rush turned toward Arathan and his eyes narrowed. The soul space around him started to light up around the fringes, arcs of electricity starting to crawl menacingly around it. A moment later the display faded and Rush relaxed his expression. It wasn’t like he hadn’t known Arathan was there. The crow felt like a permanent fixture of the environment. Something that always hung just within sight, a piece of the neighborhood that Rush intensely disliked but was incapable of getting rid of.

“What?” Rush asked.

“What?” Arathan cocked her head slightly, a faint expression of mock surprise on her face. “What’s that? An honest to goodness response? No, grrrrr ‘I’ll eat you’ or anything remotely aggressive like that hilarious shaking rattle you have? I guess I shouldn’t be angry at you. You’ve only been awake for a little while and I certainly wasn’t being a good teacher.”

“What?” Rush repeated for a second time. His eyes began to narrow hostilely again and he started to turn around. His tail rose behind him in warning. “Tell me what you want or go away.”

“Oh my, I suppose having all those words burned into your space has certainly expanded your vocabulary, if nothing else. Want to have a song battle or something? You know what singing is?”

SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE

“Fine, sheesh, I’ll answer your very boring and basic ‘what’ so knock that off.” Arathan spread her wings and slowly glided to the edge of the barrier to the space. She cocked her head. “It’s nice, isn’t it? Becoming more aware of yourself as time passes? As Ruth grows, so will you. In a way, you’re more of a dragon than he is. All you really have to do is lie there and you get spoonfed all his knowledge and information. Albeit secondhand, so you have to make sense of it yourself…”

“Bored.” Rush sighed and started to relax a little. “Arathan is boring.”

“Can I ask you why you are so…” Arathan struggled for a moment before continuing, “explosively aggressive?”

Rush considered the question for a long moment and tapped his foot on the ground. Small clicks sounded out as his talons clicked rhythmically. The sound was weirdly soothing and Arathan started to relax herself.

The crow seemed like it was enjoying conversing for a change.

“Will show.”

Rush clicked his talon once more and the soul space began to change.

The crow looked slightly surprised, “ah, so you figured out how to project images…”

Rush just tilted his head and didn’t respond. The large sphere pulsed for a minute and then vanished. In place of Rush and the normal dimly lit soul space was a larger and darker shape. It looked like a dragon. In the center was a small sleeping ball, motionless even as the space seemed to reach toward it and tend to it. Darkness and shadow fluttered occasionally almost as if tucking in the small figure that seemed to be the nucleus of the space.

“Ah, how time flies. Look at you. Just a little ball of unrealized awareness,” Arathan chuckled. “That stupid ass dragon shape. It’s so unstable. Look at all the mana that was drifting out into the Elsewhere from the smaller forelimbs and the wingtips…”

The scene changed slightly as the space brightened. The dragon shape remained unchanged except for the fact that now there was a light on one side. Tamara had appeared. She was peering into the soul shape with a hand held over her eyes like one might do when looking through glass into a darkened storefront.

Moments later Tamara stepped in and started making gentle waving motions, disrupting the smoky darkness that was protecting the small being in the center. Tamara chuckled as the thing seemed to shift sleepily, loosely aware of her presence but unwilling to address her. She reached down and poked into the dark ball.

When nothing happened she poked again. “Trusting… little thing aren’t you?” Tamara frowned. “Just… uncurl so that I can see what you look like? There’s something about you that I just can’t put my finger on…”

Arathan immediately waved a wing. A darkness fell around Arathan as well as the entirety of Rush and Ruth’s Soul Space, covering it from view. Arathan hesitated for a moment but decided not to stop Rush from showing whatever it was that he wanted Arathan to see.

“C’mon…” Tamara was poking it with her characteristic bluntness. Arathan could hear the edge of impatience invading her voice. The crow started to wince slightly as she could already guess how she had reacted at this point.

Sure enough.

“Fine! Hahah, you fucking little thing. Just a small poke then…” This time when Tamara reached toward the ball of darkness that was trying to avoid her poking with soft shifting movements she flicked a finger at it. There was a slight thump and then a confused mewl. The sound of a small animal startled by something but as yet unconcerned. Then Tamara shocked it a little. Then… a bit more than a little.

The darkness parted as Rush and his tiny face came into view and stared confusedly outward at Tamara.

Rush’s voice came, like he was narrating this scene from the past. “What is?”

Tamara wiggled her index finger in front of Rush and the little Soul Shape followed the motion with his head. It looked like the small move exhausted him. Then Tamara zapped his snout with the barest hint of aura. It was obvious that she was trying to provoke Rush into uncoiling so she could get a look at his shape. Even now it was indistinct, like Rush was only a collection of parts that could change or morph at any moment.

“Danger…”

Instead of provoking him out of the protective darkness that was in the center of the space Rush opened his mouth and directly ate the bit of Aura that was reaching out to once again jolt him on the nose.

“No! Shit!” Tamara tried to retract aura but it was too late. Arathan understood her concern. That tiny bit of aura would have been enough to slightly hurt a soul shape and get its attention but was otherwise harmless. Most Soul Shapes, even ones that were largely unawakened, still knew better than to try and eat aura. In most cases it was likely the immature soul shape would just explode in a violent sort of unzipping fashion, probably starting at the spine.

“...good taste… Defeat danger. Eat the thing. Good.” Rush almost sounded happy as he reminisced.

Tamara however froze in the scene. Unnaturally still as she considered the small creature in front of her. The preternatural stillness of which only a creature was capable. The stillness that happened when the creature stopped pretending to be something else. No breathing, no little ticks of movements, no casual display of emotion.

The little face retreated back into the ball, presumably to go to sleep.

Tamara reached forward again… and this time there was no gentleness in her movements.

Arathan winced as Tamara began to experiment on the thing in the middle of the soul space. No. Arathan watched as Tamara began to experiment on Rush in the middle of that soul space.

“Would it help to know that there’s a very good reason for that?” Arathan asked, trying to get Rush to stop showing her the very in depth testing that Tamara had done.

“Good for who?” Rush asked with a bit of amusement.

“Okay, that’s fair. Ouch. I almost liked it better when you were monosyllabic.” Arathan sighed.

The space darkened and then changed. It was once again the dragon shape, only this time there was a golden crow approaching the space…

Arathan’s eyes widened and she started to palm her beak with her wing. “Okay! Okay! Yes! That’s me… I did that. I strolled in there and...punched the baby, so to speak…”

The scene changed again. This time Rush was awake and warning Arathan away with his rattle. Arathan looked gleeful as she started to send waves of aura projections toward the soul space...

“Yes, yes, also me. Look at me. I’m the asshole. Caw-caw-caw.” Arathan started laughing and then trailed off as the soul space once again settled down and became transparent. Arathan’s laughing trailed off as the crow appraised the stoic dragon lizard snake. “It only partially answers my question though.”

“Still waiting for my answer,” Rush sneered back at her.

Arathan opened her beak slightly and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Must be hard to be smarter than Ruth…”

“Leave. Or we fight.” Rush lowered his head and angled the tips of his horns at her. Only cold eyes stared at her.

“We’ll fight…” Arathan said slowly, “...and that’s why I came. I have to make you stronger. It’s for the best.”

“Best… for?” Rush smiled and bright red energy started to climb out of his body. Around him shapes similar to his began to materialize and turn toward Arathan with the smell of violence wafting off of them.

“So some of those things I said did get through…” Arathan smiled. She ignored his question. It was annoying that he was growing fast enough to ask such good questions. “When you give up, we’ll go visit someone else so you can get a feel for how strong you are…”

******

Rush watched without concern as Arathan casually waved a wing and shredded his projections.. Arathan was… stronger than he was. It was a truth he had been confronted during every one of their interactions. Arathan was also predictable. If Ruth did not directly attack with his main body Arathan wouldn’t directly attack his main body. Arathan was easy to anger and quick to lose her temper.

She was also full of pride. Arathan would continue to try and fight him with aura and projections because she had absolute confidence that she could outlast and overwhelm him whenever she wanted.

Rush immediately reabsorbed the shredded aura projections into the sphere of the soul space. Fighting as close to the border as she was he had no need to bite or chew them to reclaim the aura that he had expended.

His eyes narrowed.

Twice as many projections were formed within the space. It was taxing to control that many aura projections but he needed to pressure Arathan just the tiniest bit. He needed to prick her pride so she would start sending her own projections.

She was better than him in every way but one. He couldn’t directly beat her, not yet, but he was growing every day. Today. Today he would settle for a strategic victory. Or at the very least, he would be a little bit happier if Arathan wasn’t quite so pleased with her win.

No expression crossed his face as Arathan frowned at the six projections he’d made. She opened her beak and let out a snort as her red aura expanded and vaporized the closest three. The aura and energy she released also disrupted the soul space somewhat, but only a little.

Rush didn’t hesitate and instantly began devouring the aura that entered the space. His dying aura projections as well as the violent red aura that was pushing forward.

Three more projections rapidly came out of body and immediately howled and jumped toward Arathan. The slow and steady advance turned into frantic scrabbling.

Arathan snorted again as she allowed herself two projections that looked like him and his, except they were comprised of red aura.

Rush smiled as the projections began clashing against each other. He began focusing on devouring the energy every time it got away from her control and also took in the aura from his shredded projections before reforming them. While it was headache inducing it was also a cycle he could just… continue doing for some time.

It was the one thing he had noticed irritated Arathan.

The fact that he could eat her aura. She didn’t seem to be capable of devouring his.

He made four projections at a time now instead of three when he replenished his forces. The aura that was slowly devouring from her was becoming more than he could safely hold so he just started pouring it wildly into creating projections. Sometimes she wouldn’t even have finished killing one before he released his control of it and started making another. He still had more and more as the fight continued and he started feeding it into the soul space.

The sphere began to hum around them and trickles of lightning started to wreathe the area. Even though it felt more and more powerful to Ruth he saw that it didn’t phase Arathan at all. It was disappointing that even though he was growing this fast he still couldn’t even get her to face him seriously.

Lightning began to lick out toward Arathan and her projections but she just snickered again and made a smaller red sphere around her that pushed the lightning out. The edges of it were just outside of the soul space so Rush couldn’t devour them without going out and using his body.

He didn’t do that though because…

Rush bared his teeth, lips peeling back in pleasure as the projections shredded themselves in front of him.

“Why are you smirking shiteater?” Arathan had noticed, of course, and immediately wanted to know what was so funny to him.

“Arathan… is conceding that she doesn’t want to step into my territory. Arathan is a scaredy bird…”

Rush revealed even more of his teeth and did his best imitation of her laughter as her aura began to violently expand as her rage pulsed outward.

“Caw-caw-caw...right?”

Then for Rush, everything went dark.