Spice

“'S a bit berculiar, innit?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Well, the littl-ling that follows th' queen, 'course. Stripey one.”

“Why would that be-- Stop moving! I'm never going to get your feathers dealt with is you keep twitching.”

Spice sighed deeply, and diligently threaded her claws into the ruffling, rippling mass that covered Pumpkin's chest, searching for the last place she'd stopped, somewhere along the transition from glossy green to effervescent orange. Her mate had the most peculiar ideas. Probably from cavorting with all these raucous Nature-bred coatls. Or perhaps it was just Asepsis itself, and not Nature. How was she to know? This was the first clan they'd stayed with for more than a few weeks, and certainly the first Nature clan at all.

The fact that their queen was an Arcane dragon who bedecked herself in the rotting vainglory of Plague was its own mystery, and Spice was more than happy enough to let Pumpkin figure that out for himself, humming in that peculiar dialect of his youth. At least the Queen seemed to like the practice with her Old Tongue. There was only so much that keen eyes and long experience could make up for.

Spice would stay well away from all of that. Hopefully after the next brood were mature, they would find their way well away from this place. The Queen Circumstantial tended not to live up to her name, after all, always arranging and reordering to suit her politics. Perhaps things had been different under the Queen Dawning. In truth, they had not been with Asepsis long enough to recall much of old Eos's policy before she had disappeared. But, given Aurum's later works, perhaps the disappearance hadn't been so innocent as they had all believed back then.

The sooner they got out, the safer they would be.

Her claws clicked still in the downy fluff of Pumpkin's feathers.

Pumpkin snorted, a laugh that didn't quite mature rumbling through the chest her paws still laid on. “There she is,” He said, all amusement and restraint. “Nutmeg t'cut through th' cream.”

She hadn't been called Nutmeg in years, but sometimes when she made connections without being told, he called her that anyway. There was a reason they were matched, and it wasn't just their gleaming, sparking hides.

“Well, that's hardly my business,” Spice sniffed, redoubling her efforts on plucking deaf feathers and straightening live ones. Some of the older clan members spoke of the days beneath the Queen Fractured, when dragons lived or died on how beautiful her shifting tastes found them. That was hardly the case now, with hatchlings leaving of their own volition and almost never pressed into the service of a god; even those who were disappeared to live among shifting branches and dense undergrowth, not the rot alive. Things were better here than they could ever have been under that near miss, but Spice could still see the way that long assault of obsessive perfection had affected the bones of the clan. It affected her, too. She had never worried about Pumpkin's dim disinterest in proper preening before this.

Asepsis was not a good place.

“So, Dibbery's got an heir then, y'think?” Pumpkin drawled. Spice had long ago given up his pronunciation of Diberyllium. He couldn't hear the difference, and if the Queen Circumstantial didn't care, neither would she.

“I'm not thinking about any of it.” She said, firm as anything. She plucked a not quite as dead as it might have been down feather out, just to make a point. The sharp twitch of pain traveled through Pumpkin's entire body, and only when the last shudder had passed through the tip of the tail she rested on did Spice continue. “Even if I were thinking about it, I'd be thinking about how it's destined to fail. Diberyllium knew the Queen back in the old days. They fought together. What good will a baby do to stop a storm, when even the sun itself couldn't?”

Pumpkin shrugged bodily, unconcerned by the corrective thwap of Spice's wing against his neck when all his feathers fluffed out again with the action. “S only that she's m'friend, y'know?”

Spice huffed, rolled her eyes safe in the knowledge that Pumpkin couldn't see the gesture. “She's the Queen, darling. She hasn't got friends and she doesn't want them.”

Pumpkin had no answer to that. He shrunk down in some way Spice couldn't quite pin down. No doubt he really had believed the Queen Circumstantial truly thought of him as a friend.

“Oh, come now,” Spice started up again, when it was clear Pumpkin wasn't going to offer anything more. “Don't you remember the Actinides? She sent them all off one by one and kept Actinium with the children just to mock her? Or the way she turned Fire Agate and Hexacyanoferrate into watchwhers guarding a body without a mind in it, to punish them for plotting rebellion?”

Pumpkin said nothing, but the muscles of his chest tightened ominously. Her poor mate, he really did believe the Queen was his friend. How had Spice allowed this to happen? Too much time spent with Chromium Oxide and Albite, obviously.

“Delphinidin.” She said, carefully, quietly.

Pumpkin's long neck craned to bring his head close to hers, staring upside down into her own eyes. She had yet to recover from her last brooding. She was barely the size of his head. Although he would never harm her, never allow harm to come to her, there was such stark anger there, and he was so much larger. She shivered, but this was more important than paltry, animal fear. “'N what've her?”

“Iodine was the only threat left to her throne, and she gave that horrendous mess of a creature a daughter just to distract hir from the throne and the chance to lead us west.”

It was an awful thing to say. But it was an awful thing to do, too. That was what Aurum did: awful things, but always in such a careful way, so that they never looked awful.

The Actinides had been treasonous. She had sent them away to other lands rather than had them slaughtered or pressed into service, and because she was generous, she hadn't separated Actinium herself from her last brood. How could anyone fault her for that?

Fire Agate had been obsessed with the Queen Fractured, with the empty way Calcium's body responded to commands. She had gone near mad with a strange and horrible grief, until even her obsession with the brooding rosters that Calcium had entrusted her fell away. And beside her, the creature she most loathed in all the world, responsible for the slackness of the Clan Mother's muscles. Aurum had set Fire Agate the task of caretaking the not quite dead dragoness, to soothe her screeching agony. And she had set Hexacyanoferrate to repair the damage he had done. And if that meant binding the two of them together, and if that binding distracted them from scrabbling their way to rulership, then so be it.

The Albite sisters had been raised higher in the clan, in reminiscence of some old, old dragons Spice had never met. But more importantly, they were a mage of unrivalled potential and an Imperial large enough to shatter mountainsides. And when some of the eldest clanmembers whispered that it was happening again, that this was the second coming of Neon and Kyanite, information about service to the Glade Keeper found its way into Argentium's paws. And, with much fighting and crying, the Albite sisters were separated, and the threat eliminated.

But by far the worst of Aurum's machinations, her carefully crafted circumstances, was Delphinidin.

The Iodine that had greeted Pumpkin and Spice, added them to clan rosters during that months long migration, had been a very different creature to the one that sat at Aurum's right wing these days. Ze had been listless; hir own magic had sucked not only color but substance from hir body. Ze had been unfocused, exhausted, unable to even string together sentences, barely able to write. But, far more than that, ze had been dangerous. There was rage and grief swirling beneath the surface of hir skin, and ze all but sang of old, old magic. Spice hadn't even been able to look directly at hir. She was no mage, had little mage-sense, but even to her mundane eyes, Iodine was a horror of indescribable power. Albite had been brought forward to be Clan Mage, the healer and scrier, but Iodine was where the true power lay. Something that had once upon a time bound hir to mortality had been flayed open, and all that toxic grief had lifted hir to an unspeakable place.

Far beyond any other, Iodine had been a threat to Aurum's crown.

“The Queen Circumstantial brought Delphinidin to us,” Spice said, low and careful. It was unlikely that anyone was near enough to hear, but this was treasonous speech, and she wasn't nearly as certain of Pumpkin's good standing as he seemed to be. “She sought out Delphinidin and presented her to Iodine to tie hir down, sew hir up, turn hir mortal and obedient again.”

Pumpkin withdrew his looming head. Gingerly, Spice returned to her preening work.

“Could be,” he allowed. The words vibrated up through his feathers. “Could be that, or, could be she wanted Actinium's babes to have their dam, wanted Argent t'be happy, wanted give Agate what she wanted, n Cyano what he deserved, n brought in a mind healer to heal Io's mind.”

Spice could almost see what he meant, but it was too obvious what Aurum was actually doing. Her mate trusted too easily.

“Could be,” He added, soft enough that his feathers didn't move against Spice's claws. “That Dibbery was th' one at told her how t'do everythin and without her, Aurum's best in't enough. Could be she needs a new Queen's Consort to tell her what t'do right.”

Spice sighed, pulled another dead feather away, settled the surrounding ones in the right positions. “It could be,” she allowed, delicately.

But, of course, it wasn't.