Issor

---

"I'm Butch. This is Sundance. We're the Hole in the Sky Gang" Issor discovered his curious condition as a child. His innate clumsiness meant that he was often found first in any stealth games they played, and was easily avoided when he was the one seeking. Just once, he wanted to win. As the old adage goes, be careful what you wish for. Issor spent a night begging the Gladekeeper to hide him when next they played: to wrap him in leaves, or guide him to a hiding spot no one had found yet. To do something, just this once. Perhaps she listened, perhaps something else found his prayers, but when next he played with his nestmates, he won the game. For hours they searched, exploring every inch of the Viridian Labyrinth as only those born to the Gladekeeper could, but they found no trace. By the time night fell, the whole clan was worried, and halfway across Sornieth, Issor settled himself to sleep, shivering and terrified, in the Southern Icefields. He had to make his way back the long way, walking for the most part, since his wings weren't yet strong enough to carry him. He sat through the lectures about running off, about how much trouble he was in, how evil he was to make everyone suffer so, and brushed them all away. It wasn't exactly his fault, after all. He wanted to tell them, to protest, but something inside him shied away. This was his secret, the first he'd ever had. Finally, he'd found something he was good at, something unique. He'd tell them, eventually. Once he'd worked out how to control it.

The next few months of Issor's life passed quickly, blurring together. He spent most of his days focusing his mind, trying to find that bubble inside him that had burst when he'd opened the first wormhole, the first door across the world. It remained stubbornly illusive, and despair set in quickly. His nesmates did their best to cheer him up, but it was difficult when they didn't know what was troubling him.

As these things do, the experience began to take on the strange, distant quality in his mind of a moment long gone, and he began to wonder if he had imagined it. Secrets kept too long, he learned, weren't good for your health. So he shared it. Mazu was always a good listener, patient and calming, so he tried her first. She'd never heard of anything similar, of course, but there was something soothing in how seriously she took his story, how she considered it of importance.

"My mother was born to the ice. Though I have never been there, in her stories it was exactly as you described it, though," Mazu smiled, gently, "I think she saw more beauty there than you did. You were very brave to make your way back to us like that. It can't have been easy."

"But what do I do about it?"

Mazu always tried to give good advice, always tried to help those in distress, no matter how bizarre their situation.

"Have you thought," she suggested, at length, "that perhaps it wasn't you who opened the portal at all? Something external, perhaps, that summoned you away?"

He hadn't. It was an unnerving thought, that he could have been so dominated by something he couldn't even see.

"But... why? Why me, why-"

"Why anyone," Mazu replied with a shrug. "You just have to have faith."

He left Mazu feeling uncomfortable, but strangely happier for it. Maybe she was right, after all. If he didn't create that first portal, then he wasn't a failure for being unable to do it again. He couldn't! And whatever it was, it had clearly turned it's attention away from him, at least for now. Maybe he should allow it to drift, to become a curious dream. Get on with his life.

Six months to the day he'd first Travelled, he had moved on with his life. He hunted for his clan, catching birds and snakes in the high branches of trees, however impossible it might seem with his size. He laughed and joked with his brother, Oblivion, and raced him through the undergrowth or through the sky. He was happy.

The two boys were racing, charging across the hollows and glades of the Wilds, gleefully trading insults back and forth as one or the other took the lead. Neither was focusing on the path ahead.

Silverbeasts weren't common in the Wilds. They tended to stick to the Rainsong, where the climate suited them and the trees weren't quite so densely packed. This one was lost, confused, and angry. It lunged after the two imperials as they passed, landing on Oblivion's back and sinking it's claws in deep, ripping at his side. Oblivion screeched, falling back, and with only a seconds hesitation, Issor leapt into the fray to aid his brother.

Two against one, and both bigger than the beast, it should have been an easy victory. But neither Issor or his brother had ever really trained to fight. They writhed instinctively, slashing and biting, getting in each other's way as often as not. They were losing.

As Issor sank his teeth into the Beast's shoulder, it roared and threw him back, crashing into a tree, and in the moment he took to steady himself, time slowed. Oblivion was getting weaker, struggling less as the claws bit deeper into his back. He was barely moving. The Beast roared in pleasure, master of it's fate for another moment, and leaned down to finish the Imperial off, and inside Issor the bubble burst again.

The wormhole stretched out above the Beast's head, pulling out of the sky and the foliage above and spinning like a tornado above it, crackling with energy. It pulled at the world, at Issor, at the Beast and Oblivion. The trees themselves bent towards it, and sticks and stones and bric-a-brac whirled away into it's depths.

Watching something living pulled into a wormhole is a strange experience. The Beast didn't pause. It didn't look up, or even seem to notice the oncoming doom. Perhaps it didn't have time. It's body stretched and seemed to warp as it was pulled up into the whirling storm, thinning until it could have been made of parchment. Beyond the mouth, it seemed to dissolve, flaking away into the distance, the far side of the portal and vanishing forever as the wormhole closed and time sped up again.

He learned later that he was too late to save Oblivion; the damage was too great, even for Mazu's considerable skill. As the clan mourned their loss, Hephaestus and Qu Yuan quietly led him away. He was brave, they said. He did what he could, it wasn't his fault, no matter how bad he felt.

"There is power in you," Hephaestus said, softly. "Power that I can't explain. Perhaps some day, you will explain it to me."

It wasn't exactly a dismissal. Issor knew that, if he chose, he would be welcome to remain in his birth clan, and that they would help him all they could. He would always have a place with them, in the lair and in their hearts, but he couldn't stay. He could feel the energy inside him, now, could feel the flow of it. Something was waiting, in the world beyond, and he had to find it.

---

Issor came to Ista by accident, as so many dragons do, after finding himself suddenly and unintentionally in the Leviathan Trench. He was given food and shelter, the chance to dry off in one of the dry upper caverns of the lair, and good company. He never expected to find a good friend there.

Baeldiin is, in many ways, like him: warped by the energies of the world. They aren't exactly the same - Issor can open wormholes and travel through them at will, Baeldiin can travel through time and manipulate it - but they understand each other in a way no other ever could.

Issor isn't sentimental enough to call it 'coming home', but he does take it as a sign that when he tries to leave, he teleports back to Ista in his sleep. No getting rid of him now.

"Hey, Bae," he says to his friend one day, "We're the Hole in the Sky Gang."