Dhehraoghehd

"Good morning! The world is ending."

Those were the first words uttered by a stranger at the entrance to Rakraēt a month after the ground stopped shaking randomly and the chain of natural disasters ended.

The stranger was very... orange. It was impossible to find a part of him that was not. It was not just his unusual coloring, however, that drew Rahka's attention – the stranger's scales glowed like a simmering fire as if they were molten lava, and his eyes were an open flame. Quite literally. He smiled cheerfully as he cast a warm, mild light on Rakraēt's walls.

Rahka was not impressed. She'd fought giant manta rays and ghastly horrors. In comparison, a Fae on fire – however strange – was not a threat. Probably. She hoped.

"We live at the edge of the Fortress of Ends," she informed him. "And below our feet lies the Forest. It is full of magic and does as it pleases. The world ends three times a month here."

The stranger seemed to chew on that. He could not seem to stop smiling. "Yes, yes— but the end of the world I am talking about is not one you can survive, see? I flew outside of the sky and saw inside stars. So I know."

Rahka blinked at him. She could not make herself believe him, because she knew another dragon that always spoke in riddles – their so-called leader, Matsu – and he was hardly ever serious when he deigned to say anything to her.

"Why are you here?" she asked the Fae regardless. She was the Guardian of the mountain which lie on the edge of nowhere. If the world truly was ending, the stranger would do better to go somewhere warm. On a holiday, perhaps. So he could stop bothering Rahka.

"Oh, but have I not said?" he responded, puzzled, forehead creasing. "The end of the world will start here. And only I can stop it. I saw it in the stars."

Rahka stared him down. She didn't know what she could say. She let the stranger in; if anything, at least he might have some stories to tell, crazy as they might be.

But she would keep watch.



The stranger's name was Dhehraoghehd. Or something.

"Theraohed," Sharr repeated.

"Sharper," the stranger said without reproach, endlessly chipper. After that followed a string of sounds Sharr did not know how to pin down, much less replicate, and he was smart.

"You know what," Sharr said. "Let's just talk about that theory of yours instead. The world ending and all that. Do you have any specifics?"

"It's not a theory," the stranger said, bristling slightly for the first time since arriving in Rakraēt. Others doubting him seems to be a sore point, Sharr noted, and if he cares about what others think, he cannot be that crazy. Maybe just a little.


He looked strange and spoke about strange things, but – as Rahka originally assessed – he was not a threat. Neither a fighter nor a mage, he tinkered some in the forge abandoned by Aule, but his crafts were simple and utilitarian – most of them small lamps that he hung on the walls of Rakraēt.

"You live very primitively," he commented once, to Kieran, more curious than anything. "You have many great thinkers here, and yet you live like... animals. With hardly any electricity, in a cave system you inhabited without making it comfortable, warmed only by the core of a volcano—," he shook his head. "Next to a ground brimming with raw magic. Where none of you set any wards. You forage in the Forest like it's no big deal that time goes haywire there."

Kieran was shocked. "Thank you," he said sincerely, as if being recognized for Most Reckless was an achievement.

"How can any of you stand it?"

The Wildclaw hummed. Then he shrugged. "I suppose most of us choose to do anything that isn't maintenance. Besides, the winter is long and harsh here, so I guess resources are more important than how pretty the boxes we put them in are."

The stranger nodded. "I see, I see now," he said as if only just understanding something. "Thank you!" And then he flitted off to his strange, almost menial work.

Except he also started to carve sigils nobody could recognize on the walls, long winding lines of geometric shapes that seemed to appear overnight. It took a while for the Rakraēti to notice, but the lamps he built never ran out of fuel, and even Kieran could not open them to see how they worked – though they looked deceptively simple, their surface was flat and smooth without any grooves in it, shining with a steady, pulsing light, almost as if they were alive.



"It's worse than the Coatl language," Ristaya complained, a Coatl herself and endlessly bitter about her own language deficiencies. "It sounds like he's choking on glass." Someone else might have said it with derision, but from her, it was just the most accurate description she came up with.

"Maybe only other Faes understand it," Kirra suggested off-handedly. "They are different from us, having been made by a different magic."

"Maybe," Sharr agreed, musing.

He deflated quickly, though, when it turned out that no Faes in Rakraēt could understand the stranger either. Tristan only scoffed and commented that it probably wasn't even a legitimate language, just the ramblings of someone insane. But how did thoseharsh sounds just roll off his tongue when the stranger spoke them?

But Sharr was not a linguist, so he eventually left it be.



"I told you the volcano will explode," Sharr said as they walked. "I told you."

Matsu was unperturbed. He swiped snow from a nearby rock, which he then turned over. "You and your conspiracy theories. Nobody said it was our volcano that will start the end of the world, come on. We don't even know if it's active."

"Well, it might be," Sharr fumed. "And since you insist on erasing my protections whenever I set them up, I will not come to save you! Maybe he will," he nodded towards... Theohed? Something like that – busy with doodling his strange shapes in the snow in the distance. "But I wouldn't count on it. You're so horrible to be around, who could stand you? Especially after the end of the world. If you were the only dragon to survive besides me, I would kill you."

"Oh, I don't doubt you would try," Matsu said with unhidden mirth. "But could you, mister scientist, who fights only logical problems for a living?"

Sharr narrowed his eyes. "Oh, it's on," he said – and they were off to duel each other, forgetting both about hunting and Dhehraoghehd, writing his lonely shapes on the ground with a purpose no one but him understood, in a language no one but him seemed to comprehend.