Auda

"So this is where you've been."

Auda looked up, craning her neck to stare into the corner of the dark cave. Unsurprisingly, Jun had managed to approach quietly despite her size, and her lanterns tossed light against the sharp edges of stone. Her wings stayed tucked tight against her body, her expression watchful. Auda dismissed the distance between them as safe and turned her attention to the runes she had been carving.

Jun rumbled low in her chest. "Auda. Answer me."

"You've given me no reason to." Auda leaned down to breathe magic into the runes amidst the scattered bones. At least one predator had once used this cave to hunt. Perhaps a carnivorous Beastclan. Perhaps a clanless dragon, desperate and alone. Let Jun think it was Auda's; Auda had no reason to tell her otherwise.

Jun's tail made a hissing sound against the stone as it slithered back and forth. Deliberate; intended to disconcert, given that Jun could move as silently as a Fae when she chose.

Intimidation tactics had never worked on Auda.

At length, Jun said, "You aren't with your cult anymore." Auda ignored her. "They think you must be dead; their most loyal member must be dead if she no longer returns to them."

Auda examined the bone dust on her claws, then resumed sweeping the bones away from the runes. "The more fools them."

"Indeed. You were never loyal to them, were you? You're a creature with no capacity for loyalty." Jun said the words with careful, precise distaste. She was a Guardian, a creature born to loyalty, raised from birth to worship at her own cult and prepared to sacrifice her own life in the service of others.

"Why are you here?" Auda asked, finally. She turned to face Jun again. The rest of the spell could wait until another day. She had no interest in making herself vulnerable to others. She would have to ward the entrance next time to keep out unwanted pests.

"I was curious." Jun's wings unfurled, glittering wildly in the light of her lanterns. "You should be disappointed in your old cult. They've let themselves wallow in ignorance if they believe that Auda the Undefeated could be brought down in silence, without a trace left."

"They like to see in others what they have themselves." Auda extended her neck towards Jun without moving her feet and was pleased to feel Jun's emotions jangle in response. Jun so rarely felt anything but quiet and composed. "You, on the other hand, hold no loyalty to them or to me."

"No." Jun's wings snapped closed, and her jagged jaw gaped open in a grin. Auda felt her own eyes narrow and focus in on the sight. "I do travel. I was born to the Wind; it's in my nature."

"Let's not pretend you believe that hogwash."

Jun's grin widened. "You're right," she said, her voice full of a satisfaction the source of which Auda couldn't place, "I don't. But you'd be a fool if you thought that meant I shared your own twisted beliefs. And you are many things, Auda, but you are nobody's fool."

Auda flared her own wings, sifting over Jun's incongruous words in her mind as rapidly as she could, looking for clues, for logic, for a pattern. Knowledge rose in her: she had little interest in fighting Jun, but if she had to— if Jun was threatening her—

"I'm curious to see where this goes," Jun added. "Auda the Undefeated, the Destroyer, making a protective rune in a cave full of the whispering dead." She rose up on her hind legs, then gave a massive flap of her wings, enough to send bones clattering and to force Auda's claws into the stone to hold her own place. Then Jun was gone, with nothing to even prove that she'd been there beyond Auda's own swirling thoughts.

Auda did not leave the cave for a while, after that, and when she did the sun was casting little glints of light off of her old dagger, the one she had left behind at the cave mouth. She did not touch it or even glance at it for more than a second before she set off towards the cave she had made into an actual home, where she could see a twisting, dancing platform full of laughing dragons soaring high overhead.