The endless night that surrounded Lily was dark and oppressive, intimidating in its permanent vastness. Cold wind whipped at her body and coarse snow scraped at her paws, but it was the vast emptiness all around her that chilled her the most. A desolate expanse stood between her and her intended destination, a destination that consisted of flying ever deeper into the frozen wastes until the guardian they had been told lived there noticed their existence. Such a task would be difficult and dangerous even if they were both fully prepared and mentally aware; this frozen expanse looked unlikely to offer second chances, and it would only take one slip to throw them into danger.

"Who are you?" Beryl demanded, shivering and shaking flakes of snow and ice everywhere. He circled her twice, staring wildly, and held a shot in the back of his throat, ready to use. "Where am I? Why is this happening?"

Lily held back a bitter laugh; they were so close, and this might be the last time she ever had to convince him to listen to her. That made it no less heart-rending, and no less necessary. But it did cast a sort of false importance on this moment, this argument, even though it was one she had talked her way through half a hundred times already.

"You don't remember the answers to those questions because you are sick," she said simply, making sure to avoid sounding overly sympathetic. She knew from experience that a cold, firm statement allayed his suspicions far more easily than anything overly familiar or vague. "The symptoms include progressive memory loss. What is the last thing you remember?"

"I don't know if I should believe that," he growled.

"We are moon-cycles of travel below the ground, in a place that cannot possibly have been reached without you following along of your own free will," Lily said neutrally. "If you cannot remember how you came to be here, then there is something wrong."

"I've seen plenty of things that are not as obvious as they seem," he retorted. The light he held in the back of his throat illuminated a patch of snow between them, bright and glaring compared to the rest of the icy wastes. "And I do not know you."

"You did, for a while," she huffed, turning away. It was all calculated, a display improved upon and perfected, and even breaking eye contact was just another part of it. She hated how fluid and false she had become, even as she used and abused the practice to ensure he didn't do anything rash. A moment of vulnerability there…

There was a pause; he was trying to hold on to his anger, but more importantly, he was wondering what had happened, whether it was her doing or something else entirely. He could see her back from where he stood, once she turned and crouched down to give him a clear view, which might also have something to do with his hesitation.

"Why did I come here with you, if that is what happened?" he asked brusquely.

"To find a guardian who lives in the cold," she answered. A cold wind whipped against them both, perfectly accentuating her final word. "Yours is a sickness of the mind, and we were told one who specializes in those things lives here. We are supposed to go deeper into the cold."

"Tell me something you should not know," he challenged. He had led with that this time; she was surprised. Maybe it was the physical proof of the cold, dreary environment they stood in, but usually he took a lot longer to talk around to the giving proof stage without her outright suggesting it.

"The island of thorns and unnatural caves had a puzzle-door your companion solved along the way," she offered. That, he had given her a whole moon-cycle ago as the nature of his memory loss became apparent, something only he and Ember could possibly know. It was not a good memory, he had told her, but it was an old one.

He eyed her more cautiously, letting the light of his building fire die out. She was not so gullible as to believe he was not primed to leap away and fire if she tried anything suspicious, but he was letting her think he had relaxed.

"I don't remember telling you that, and I know you cannot have gotten it from Ember," he said seriously. "Tell me something else. Something older."

"Your Dam had grey scales," she replied.

His wings, held out threateningly, slumped back to a more relaxed posture. "Okay, I get it, you know," he growled rudely. Again, a reaction she expected. High tension and a reminder of one he had lost long ago did not make for polite acceptance, but any sort of acceptance was enough. "Tell me what is going on, who you are, and why it is just us out here."

"While we fly," she suggested, shivering in the wind and intermittent pelting of little ice crystals. She was breaking the pattern again, but she needed to; they could not stand around forever, it was only a matter of time before they were simply too cold to do anything.

She didn't wait for him to agree, shaking her wings out even as she spoke and then immediately taking to the air. He would follow, he always did; she was his only source of answers, especially here, and he didn't know how to get out.

It was all a trick, a farce, a recital where one participant thought he was making up his lines as he went along. But it kept him trusting her enough to follow, and that was enough. Even if it sucked the joy out of being around him, made him snappish and rude because, in his mind, he had every right to be. She couldn't even blame him… But she wanted her Beryl back, not the regressing shadow he had become.

"Tell me," he demanded. "Who, where, why, and how."

And so she did, half her mind on the cold cross-winds they were flying through. She recited the words, the explanation of her life and his, without thinking, without pausing for his reactions. Those varied more than his initial response to waking up confused and in an unknown place, but they tended to follow similar patterns even then. Disbelief, veiled suspicion, open suspicion, more disbelief when she mentioned her own issues, and then a sort of acceptance as she got around to detailing his own injury. Horrified acceptance, maybe, but acceptance nonetheless. It all was far too insane and elaborate for anyone trying to trick him to bother with, and while he never fully trusted her, the story first told always had an unfair clawhold on the one hearing it.

The experience was not new, but the environment they flew through as she spoke definitely was. She labored to speak as her gums, already dry, dried out even more. Her nose stung and ached, the insides of her nostrils throbbing like an open wound. Streams of tears froze on her face when she flew into the wind, which cracked off with little spikes of numb discomfort as she flexed her face muscles.

Below, trackless wastes of rolling snow hills and icy crags passed by. Above, icicles loomed ominously, large and presumably never falling or melting, stalactites of solid water that might have hung there, undisturbed, for season-cycles.

She tried to keep her tail to the place they had come in, but the pitch blackness of the cave and the pillars forcing her to change her course every so often conspired to ensure she would have a hard time finding her way back.

It was hard to feel more in danger than she already did, but she knew that meant they were officially committed to this course of action. They would have to rely on the guardian showing them the way out, or at least pointing them in the right direction. There was no going back.

She finished her story, bringing them up to the present day, and fell silent. Usually Beryl had questions, but this time he didn't ask her anything. The cold was getting to him too, probably.

Ahead, a blur of darkness stood in the way of the usual clearly black darkness, movement catching her eye where almost nothing could. The snowstorm, which had raged in the distance for as long as they had been in these icy wastes, was ahead of them. Or it was coming to them, or both. There was no light for the clouds and the falling snow to catch, no obvious light, but they still managed to be the darkest grey against pure black, and thus noticeable, like the pillars.

"I do not know if we should fly into that!" she called out. It was a storm and they were already slowly freezing. But it was directly in their path, and they needed to go deeper into the icy wastes, not skirt around the edges… Avoiding it could be the delay that doomed them, just as going through it and getting lost could be.

"There is a light out there," Beryl barked to her, "behind the storm! Or we would not be able to see it at all!"

She hadn't thought of that – she really should have, but she hadn't. He was right. It was grey, not black, meaning there was some source of light. Of course, that light would be behind it. By that logic, they could fly in and just follow the increasing light as they went…

She was tired, cold, and thirsty, Beryl would be the same, and it was only going to get worse. "We'll fly through, toward the light," she decided. "Okay?"

"I don't see any better options, no matter what is going on!" Beryl barked back at her. It seemed being in an imminent life or death situation made him more suspicious, not less, which was… counterproductive, to say the least. At least he was also more willing to cooperate, seeing as it was obviously necessary if he wanted to survive.

The clouds that suddenly engulfed them were cold and wet; better than flying through the snow, a constant fog instead of driving sheets of ice, but only barely. Lily tried to open her mouth and at least sate her thirst, but it didn't really work. Her gums were still dry, and colder than ever.

Beryl flew close beside her, a dark shape in a dark mist. He held his fire in his mouth, shedding a negligible amount of light on himself and the swirling clouds surrounding them. She tried to do the same, but her mouth and throat were too dry; she coughed and accidentally let a small blast go after only a few wingbeats of holding it, and the shot traveled forward and disappeared from sight far too quickly for her liking.

They flew like that for a time, forced to slow lest they fly into one of the massive pillars obscured in the gloom. They did pass by one early on in their time in the cloud, a huge looming shape that cut through the haze – or so it seemed, though they were flying and it was still – only a few winglengths to her right. If she had been going faster and drifted just a little over that way, she would have hit it.

But going slow had its own hazards. Her wings were both numb and aching, and every time she flapped, ice pinched on the inside of her joints, forming in the crevices and jabbing as it was crushed. The moisture in the air was only barely above freezing itself; they were literally flying through a place where the water in the air was turning into snow. It condensed on them, and every part of her body that was not moving grew stiff, cold, and then numb.

When the feelings, or lack thereof, got too persistent and too widespread, she fired a full-strength blast into the air and dove through the resulting short-lived explosion of light and more importantly, heat. Beryl followed suit, and they emerged mostly clean of the build-up.

Mostly. She also emerged shimmering, but it was so cold that her camouflage wore off in less than a tenth of the time it usually lasted, during which she stuck close to Beryl.

No conversation was possible. No light could be seen, save for that which they produced and the theoretical light beyond the storm. No voice spoke in their heads to signal the end of their journey. Not yet.

Lily tracked the time they had spent in the storm by her dwindling ability to use fire. What had been somewhere between six and eight full-sized shots became five, then four, then three.

Somewhere around the use of her third-to-last full shot, she noticed that she could see Beryl's scales more clearly, and the ice building up on them. It was not light in the clouds, not even close, but there was enough ambient light that she could see clearly, much more easily than in pitch-black darkness.

Then the storm began to fade, the swirling winds dying down and the clouds growing thinner. She was too bitterly cold, even with her fire warming her only moments ago, to be cheered by that…

But when they broke out enough to see a pale yellow light in the distance, her heart definitely lifted a little bit. It shone like a solitary star in the pale abyss, surrounded by white plains of snow, ice, and the occasional pillar.

"That was close…" Beryl grumbled as they cleared the last outskirts of the storm. He had turned to fly directly toward the light, and she noticed that she had too, entirely unintentionally. She might have been bothered by that if they hadn't already so thoroughly lost the way back. They couldn't get much more lost.

The light, she saw as they got closer, was embedded in the base of another pillar. It was a massive yellow crystal, shining from within with far more potency than any of the other crystals they had seen on their travels. Large enough to be a massive boulder in its own right, it jutted out from the pillar and the ground at equal angles, a half-dozen winglengths in width alone, and ten times that in length and height.

Then they were close enough to see the pillar around it.

Lily didn't know what she was looking at. The rocks were formed oddly, angular and repetitive. Symmetrical, piled high in complex configurations. Broken down in places, breaking the pattern, but there was a pattern, and that was anomalous.

"You lied," Beryl said in a low growl, flying closer to her. "You said there are no No-scaled-not-prey down here."

"That's what I was told, and we have never seen any sign of them," she objected. They reached the pillar, and despite the cold, despite their mission, Beryl dropped down to land by the arranged rocks.

"Then what is this?" he asked, pawing at the rocks. "Only No-scaled-not-prey build like this. Only No-scaled-not-prey build at all."

"I don't know," she said, landing beside him. The stone was cold, and while the crystal gave off plenty of light, casting their shadows long beside them, it emitted no heat. Even were it as warm as the sun's own light, Lily didn't think it would be enough to counteract the cold all around them, but to feel absolutely no warmth was a huge letdown all the same.

She was cold. Very cold. They didn't have much time. "Maybe there were No-scaled-not-prey down here long ago, or maybe others have learned to imitate them," she said, not even bothering to look at the rocks up close. "But we need to keep going."

"You do not want to see what is inside?" he asked, nodding toward an opening between the shaped and piled rocks. There was a dark, heavily shadowed passage beyond.

"It will be cold and dark and a dead end, no I do not want to waste time on that," she growled, bouncing from paw to paw in an effort to keep moving. "We need to go. If you really want to explore, we can come back later, when you are not in danger of forgetting where you are while in the depths of such a place."

"I did not want to, going into old, unnatural places never ends well," Beryl huffed. He took to the air, and Lily gratefully followed him. Their brief time on the ground had done nothing to warm her up, and moving, no matter how cold the air was, was preferable to standing still and letting the cold seep in. She already felt so deeply chilled that even her own fire – of which she used her second to last blast while leaping into the air – wasn't enough to warm beneath her scales, not for more than a heartbeat.

"Then why did you ask if I did?" she asked as they got back up to speed.

"Vithvarandi would have," he said gruffly. "No offense to you, especially if your whole story is true, but this reminds me far too much of her for comfort."

"I am nothing like her," Lily grumbled. Her throat was already sore from the cold air, and she left their short conversation at that. Further talking would just be torture for no purpose. So long as he was flying with her, in the right direction… if they were going in the right direction… it was fine.

It was fine. Being talked to with suspicion, constantly on edge, unable to really trust him, having not slept in what felt like days… She wanted this trip to be over. She wanted it to end, and it had to end the right way. But she was so cold and tired and exhausted by the constant suspicion.

Her wings dragged through the air; even the unpleasant burning of her wing shoulder muscles had faded, replaced by a deep exhaustion that she couldn't shake. Her tail shook convulsively, too cold to hold still, further slowing her flight and throwing her off. She held her legs tight against her torso, but they were so small in the face of the vast expanse of her chest and stomach, little islands of shared warmth against the bare, freezing rest of her.

Death was creeping up on her in the paws of pure tiredness, slowly but surely. They had made a mistake. A terrible mistake, even if coming to this place was the only choice they had. The–

'What are you doing here?'

Lily let out a hoarse, barking laugh. The mental voice had the gall to sound affronted by their presence, and that was funny… or she was just too tired to give a rotten fish how the massive, close to omnipotent dragon behind the voice felt about them bothering her. "Shelter," she croaked.

'Oh, fine, come down to… I knew I should not have moved. You have passed the first beacon already. Turn back, go there, wait. My servants will retrieve you.'

Turning back was an agony, one Lily would very much rather she not be subjected to. She just had to keep going forward, not back. Going back was a bad idea.

Beryl turned, though. She would be going forward alone, without him… Without listening to the guardian. She forced herself to tilt in the air and swing around.

They had finally found the attention of the one they had come to seek, but it had been close.

Maybe too close. She felt warm, and that was not right, not in the middle of this horrible place. Her insides were a raging fire, heating her, but her body didn't work that way. Something was wrong, either with her body or with her mind, and with so much cold, pushing so hard, she suspected it was the latter.

She held her last shot until they returned to the crystal and the strange stones; Beryl immediately huddled inside the stone archway, refusing to go further in, and she responded by walking right up to him, pressing her body against his, and flaming the walls.

He did the same, and they spent some time pressing their chests, their sides, and their heads against wonderfully hot stone. Lily was dizzy, her mouth bone dry and her head heavy. The time passed quickly and slowly… She was not sleeping, she couldn't sleep, but she could stand there, cold and hot and numb, and wait.

There was nothing further down, in the No-scaled-not-prey-esque structure. Just a narrow passage and a twisting hole leading down. Lily found herself staring at it… imagining No-scaled-not-prey coming up. It was a funny thought, a simple one she could hold to. Simpler than the thought that they might die here if the Guardian's servants could not do something to warm them. She had no more fire, Beryl had used the last of his at the same time as her. Body heat was all they had now, and it was not enough.

O-O-O-O-O

Lily could not sleep, she was not sleeping, but she was dreaming nonetheless. Dreaming of great white dragons with spines and blue eyes and cold breath finding them. Of being picked up, clutched against a hot chest and carried bodily away. Of seeing a rising white shell far away, of going to it, of passing inside… Of knowing it was a shell. It was all a blur until the numbness wore off, and then her entire body was prickling like bugs were trying to eat their way out.

'Foolish of you, to come all this way without a guide.'

She had been the guide, Considera could not have come… She was barely lucid, but the little part of her that understood was offended in a vague, distracted way. The greenery above her head and under her body was more interesting than insults that she did not understand.

'But you must have come for a reason… I see. Maybe that. You wished to be fixed.'

She didn't come for herself… She didn't want to be meddled with. Beryl needed the help, not her.

'You're delirious,' the guardian decided.

She agreed. She didn't have any way of saying so – and hadn't been speaking at all throughout this one-sided conversation. That didn't seem to matter.

'Sleep and get back to me on being meddled with,' the guardian added. One of the great white dragons came up to her and poked about her neck and chin until it hit the special spot that sent her to sleep.

O-O-O-O-O

Lily knew ice-burns. She knew the feeling of having one's scales so cold that when they warmed up, the skin around and underneath was chafed and sore. They came about as a result of spending too much time in the snow or in cold water or otherwise cold. They were usually localized to a limb, an ear or a tailfin or a paw, and while they were never permanent or really all that dangerous, they hurt like crazy.

Waking up to a full-body ice burn was a novel, terrible experience. Odd green foliage tickled at her chafed, sore skin, and when she rolled onto her back to escape the annoyance, she had the dubious pleasure of realizing that her scar was the least sore and sensitive part of her body.

The ceiling was green too… Everywhere was green. Her vision took a long time in clearing – something that worried her more than the full-body discomfort, truth be told – but when it did, she could make out alien vines and plants, long and thin and nothing like the grass and trees she knew.

They were inside an egg of ice; that much she remembered. But the interior of the egg, much like a real egg, harbored life. In this case, plants and not much else. Water dripped down the ice walls, and light came from a whole pile of yellow crystals heaped together in the center of the egg.

She gingerly padded over to the nearest wall and held her tongue out, slowly leeching water off while avoiding the trap of the wall sticking to her tongue; it was so dry and the ice wet enough that she would probably have to flame it off, and she had no fire.

The trickle of water took time in quenching her thirst, but as she stood there, she felt more and more like herself, clear-thinking and alive.

'Close' was too casual a word for what they had gone through, for how far along the razor-sharp edge between survival and death they had come. That was a near-death experience, plain and simple and terrifying. She remembered being all but delirious, huddling with Beryl despite his amnesia and general distrust, simply because they both understood that it might keep them alive a little longer. The same reasoning, or maybe just instinct with no logical thought involved, had led to Beryl going into the strange structure he had just said he didn't want to explore.

They had been on the edge, and then they had been falling off the edge, metaphorically speaking. If the guardian's servants, whoever they were, hadn't been so large and hot-blooded, she might not have survived the flight to this place.

Beryl might not have survived. She jerked away from the trickle of water and cast her eyes about the green interior of the ice-egg. It was small, only a few dozen paces across in any given direction, but the greenery reached up to her chest even when she was standing and obscured her view.

Beryl was off near the light pile, staring into the jumble of crystals with a vacant expression. She relaxed a little. He was alive, standing… probably just as achy in his own skin and scales as she was, but that was a small consequence compared to death.

"You okay?" she asked tentatively, walking toward him. He had probably forgotten everything again, but they were here, within the guardian's range, so she had no idea what might be going on in his head.

'He is otherwise occupied and cannot hear you,' the guardian said in her mind. This mental voice was also female, and unlike the other there was no ambiguity. Lily wondered if there were any male guardians. On the one paw, every single one she had encountered was female. On the other, this made two she had met, so that was not exactly a pattern.

'My kind has males and females,' the guardian answered. 'I am not so sure of the other… She has been around since I hatched, and will still be around long after I die. Those who guard the entrances are greater than those of us who stay below in our domains. But you are not here to ask me questions about my kind.'

"I'm here to see Beryl healed of the mental affliction he is cursed with," Lily said formally. "I was told you could do it."

'I have already begun,' the guardian assured her. 'He was far along, but not irrecoverable. It will take some time, but he will be restored.'

A mountain-crushing weight lifted from her back and wing shoulders, just like that. Not a real one, of course, but for how light she felt, it might as well have been. Only her pained everything kept her from leaping and howling her relief out for the entire ice-egg to hear. If plants could hear, that was. She restrained herself to a very satisfied purr and shake of her tail.

'You were sent here,' the guardian said. 'By who? Few know of my domain except as a place to avoid. For good reason. I prefer my home colder than most can bear, and those with me who can thrive in the cold do not wish to be bothered by outsiders.'

"Considera, a Fear-monger who does not do what the rest of her kind do." Lily volunteered. "Are there many who direct those with Beryl's problem to you?" She would have assumed that what Beryl was suffering was distinct enough that the guardian could draw the connection between him and Fear-mongers, and from there to Considera. Said Fear-monger had certainly talked about sending many different victims to this guardian.

'I have not heard from her or hers for a while,' the guardian mused. 'It is good to know they are still doing what they do. Did they also send you for your problem, or did the dark wing pick you up along the way?'

"I'm not sure what you're talking about," Lily huffed. "I do not have a problem…" Unless, of course, the guardian was referring to how she had gone crazy.

'You cannot sleep,' the guardian said matter-of-factly. 'Not of your own accord. This is a rare problem among those who come down from the above. When you were a fledgling, you slept in the open and woke with the sun often, did you not?'

"No, actually, I slept in a cave. Why?" She moved to stand by Beryl, though she faced out toward the wall of the ice-egg instead of staring into the crystals. Living greenery was far more calming to look at, especially after their ordeal in the lifeless wastes.

'You should not have been susceptible, then,' the guardian said firmly. 'Are you sure… Wait. I see. That is… Problematic.'

"There's something more wrong than my not sleeping?" she asked anxiously. Having someone look into her mind and be audibly bothered by what they found was not good for her nerves.

'Not with you,' the guardian growled. 'With… It is not your problem. You do not know how you acquired this affliction?'

"You say that like there was one event that led to me being unable to sleep on my own," Lily said doubtfully. "It just sort of… happened. If there was one specific instance that caused it, I do not know."

'No, I see that you do not… I can fix this. Easily, in fact, more easily than if it was naturally occurring. Do not think about the feeling you have when you are slipping into slumber.'

Lily hadn't been thinking about anything of the sort, and she had more important things to think about anyway. If she had been given her inability to sleep, that meant there was some physical cause and unless she was extremely unlucky, it meant that someone had done it to her. Slipping a plant into her food, maybe, and though she was long past resenting Holly, this new revelation made her wonder whether it was all a ruse, all a setup. Holly's actions took on a far more sinister light if they were all premeditated with foreknowledge of how Lily would succumb to an intentionally afflicted illness of the mind–

'It was not from any of your pack or those you traveled with,' the guardian assured her. 'I know this for certain, as it cannot be induced by any plant or physical means. And while you are doing a truly admirable job of not thinking about that feeling, I said not to because I need you to and most find it harder to avoid thinking about something after being told to do so… Think about the feeling that comes over you when you are about to fall asleep, please.'

Lily snorted irreverently at the guardian's failed trick of the mind, appeased by the assurance that Holly had not secretly engineered her fall from power from the start. She tried to think about that sensation of drifting off, of closing her eyes and feeling a calmness drifting over her… It was different depending on how tired she was, or so she remembered. She hadn't slept naturally in moon-cycles, not since coming down below the ground. The relatively short time spent in the cavern with the pack, time spent travelling on her own, travelling with Beryl… Maybe half a season-cycle by now, maybe more.

She imagined that sensation behind her eyelids and deep in her body as vividly as she could for a time. It wasn't there, but she knew how it felt. A comforting weight settling over her but not, her limbs relaxing, a heartbeat in her ears and maybe another next to or on top of her.

'You are back to normal,' the guardian said a while later. 'Do not make a habit of pushing yourself to go without sleep for long periods of time. I have fixed it, but the groove is still there to be fallen into if you push hard enough. Going a night or two in a row without sleep will not make you relapse, but doing it regularly, or going much longer than two days might.'

"I understand," she murmured, holding back a real yawn. She had no desire to push herself like that ever again, not when the consequences were so dire. Not that she was likely to find herself in such a position again, anyway.

'It will take much longer for me to finish with your companion,' the guardian warned. 'Most of a cycle at least, though you have slept through much of it already.'

"What are you doing, if I might ask?" Lily asked respectfully, turning to watch Beryl. Unlike the other guardian, she had no real ill will toward this one; the power she wielded was troubling, true, but less so in the paws – if she had paws – of one who stayed away from people and used said power to heal.

Beryl stood stock still, having not moved at all in the time since she first saw him, save for the rise and fall of his chest to indicate he was still breathing.

'The illness he suffered was complex and, once the venom left his system, solely of the mind,' the guardian said. 'Do you truly want an explanation more in-depth than me saying that I am undoing what it has done?'

"I'd like to hear a more detailed explanation if you wouldn't mind giving one," Lily confirmed. She sat back on her hind legs and tail, raising herself up high enough that she could look down at Beryl's back and wings.

'Imagine a maze of corridors, or tunnels,' the guardian said slowly. 'Now imagine that every so often, a dragon comes into existence at a random place in the maze. They travel through until they reach another random place, where they disappear.'

Lily had so many questions about why or how that would happen in real life, but as a metaphor it was simple enough. "I am thinking of it," she said confidently. "What does that represent?"

'The path of a thought,' the guardian explained. 'Very simplified, but enough for our purposes. The dragon is what one thinks of at any given time, and every step of the way is a connected memory. If you think of water, you might first think of the feeling of wetness on your tongue, then of a running river, then of an ocean, and then depending on the context you would stop on one of those, or turn back to one. The path of your thoughts.'

"That's… yes, I get that too." She wished she could actually see what the guardian was talking about; that actually seemed understandable and interesting, even though she knew she was only being told of a very simple version of what actually occurred.

'In a healthy mind, that dragon will not have any trouble moving from the start to the end, wherever they might be,' the guardian continued. 'Some paths may dull due to age, others might lead down well-worn tangent paths, but all would be accessible. This specific sickness of the mind, however…'

"What does it do?" she asked curiously. Now that Beryl was being cured – presumably as they talked – she wasn't so guilty about wondering how it worked. If he was currently suffering from it, she might not have asked. Or maybe that was just her rationalizing why she felt nothing but curiosity and relief at this exact moment.

'The dragon comes into the maze, but their steps leave behind muck, tracking it wherever they go,' the guardian mentally growled. 'That is the sickness. The short-term memories, the paths just being created, collect the muck the fastest. One tends to think about last cycle more often than one thinks about any one specific memory from long ago. Over time, the muck collects in those memories too, though. And when there is enough in the mind, it begins to spread of its own accord, from the places of most concentration to those of the least, usually ending up going back in one's experiences.'

"You're describing it like it's malevolent," she noticed.

'It is not, but such a needlessly cruel thing often feels so, especially this one, where it starts out mostly passive but then reaches a critical mass and becomes actively harmful,' the guardian admitted. 'Right now, I am cleaning that muck out. As a side effect, he is vividly remembering each memory as I uncover it, though only in flashes.'

"He'll get them all back in full, though?" Lily asked.

'He will, it is only this involuntary remembrance he is experiencing now that is there and gone,' the guardian assured her. 'I am seeing many of these memories in full… Enough to be sure they are all there.'

"You had better not tell anyone what you see," Lily growled, her thoughts going to some of the memories she featured prominently in. Forget mating, the guardian might see her breaking down in front of Beryl, or any of the other raw, unguarded moments she had trusted him with. That was even more of a violation than being seen mating… though it was close, and she wasn't happy about the latter either. Only the implication that it was a necessary part of the process stopped her from demanding the guardian not look at all.

She eyed Beryl, but he was still blankly staring into the crystal pile. She did not envy him the dry, aching eyes doing such without blinking for so long was likely to leave him with.

"Well?" she demanded, once she realized the guardian wasn't answering her.

'Why should I do either of you any favors?' the guardian mentally growled. The shift in tone was so abrupt that Lily flinched. 'I find myself not at all inclined to be generous. Tell me, has he ever told you of the time he fought one of my kind? The time he and those he was with killed one of my kind?'

Lily had the distinct impression that were she facing the guardian now, she would be getting an eyeful of whatever teeth said guardian might possess. Lacking any face or eyes to meet, she settled for glaring at the empty air over Beryl's head. "I don't know exactly what you are, but he did tell me of a large mind-controlling dragon that nearly got his entire family killed a while back, enslaved to a No-scaled-not-prey. Is that what you mean?"

'Pretty words for executing a young one because he had fallen under bad influences,' the guardian snarled. 'Dangerous or not, you do not kill children.'

"Not even when they are actively trying to kill us in return, and are entirely capable of succeeding if not stopped?" Lily asked rhetorically. Beryl had not told her every detail of every moment of that fight, she only knew the broad strokes. But she didn't need to know everything to argue hypotheticals, and she certainly had enough motivation to do so. "I don't know what it looks like to you, but when you're a bug under the paw of the child trying to kill you, perspective changes a bit. Mercy is the luxury of the person with power, isn't it?"

'Do not start with me, one who punishes with waste pits and slit throats,' the guardian said venomously. 'I will fix him, as I have begun, but I want the both of you out of my territory as soon as possible. And when either of you see that orange dark wing, give him a message. I know not what he hides in his mind, nor why he was allowed down here, but if he enters my range I will show him all the mercy that young one of my kind was shown. None.'

A ringing started in Lily's ears, one with no physical source, and the world spun around her in a dizzy lurching fashion that had her on the ground before her head cleared. It was a spiteful move by the guardian, but… all things considered, Lily was glad the spite had been directed at her in a – hopefully – temporary way. It would be so easy for the guardian to undo fixing her or Beryl, and neither of them would know until after they had left.

Just having a last word in the form of nausea-inducing disorientation was comparatively mild. Lily staggered over a few steps away from Beryl, dry-heaved a bit, then went to quench her thirst on the wall again, this time for much longer. There was no food in this small ice-egg of verdant greenery, but she could fill her stomach with water if she had the patience for it. She would have to at some point before they ventured back out into the frigid wastes–

"We don't know how to leave, what direction to go," she blurted out, a few steps away from the precious trickle of water.

'You will be escorted to safety,' the guardian growled in her mind. 'But only because I want my message passed on. Do not speak to me again.'

"Wasn't talking to you," Lily muttered defiantly. She could see Beryl stirring, blinking and shaking his head so slowly that it was more of a repetitive back and forth turn than a shake. He was still obviously out of it, but in a few moments he might wake all of the way back up. Enough time for her to drink–

Two large, white-scaled dragons dropped down from the ceiling of the ice-egg; Lily would have sworn they weren't there only a moment ago, but for all she knew they had clung there the entire time and she was just unobservant.

Whether they had hidden or weren't around before, they weren't making any attempt to be unobtrusive now; one went to Beryl and began shaking him, while the other approached her.

"Come with us now," he growled. Up close and not addled by nearly freezing to death, Lily could see that he had a wide head and a pronounced underbite, and was generally a chunky, heavyset five-limbed dragon. She had seen stranger shapes during the last few moon-cycles, but he was still nothing like the body shape she knew best, and she couldn't help but think he would be clumsy and slow on the ground compared to her.

"Let me just take a drink first," she said, noticing that Beryl had been picked up bodily. He was hanging mostly limp from the larger dragon's grasp, still blinking rapidly. She closed the remaining distance between herself and the wall, stuck her tongue out, and proceeded to lap up as much water as possible before her guide – guard, maybe, given how they had overstayed their welcome – got impatient.

"Now," he growled a very short while later. "You are no longer welcome in our realm. Whatever you said to displease the guardian, she has said you must leave immediately."

"I'm coming," Lily assured him. Her stomach was not heavy with water like she wanted, but she could manage. "And I'll fly for myself," she added.

O-O-O-O-O

The flight back through the desolate, icy wastes was much more of an uncomfortable slog than that coming in; there was no urgency this time around, no uncertainty to taint any boredom with a constant, unavoidable danger. Not having to worry about getting lost and suffering a horrible, icy fate ironically made Lily all the more aware of the little annoyances. Such as her body aching fiercely in the cold, more so now that she had suffered a cold-burn already, or the tiredness in her wings, or how their guides were as cold and hostile as the caves in which they lived.

Or how Beryl was still barely conscious. He didn't really wake up until they were out of the snowstorm, and even then he said nothing. Lily flew under the guides, looking up at him to keep a watchful eye on his condition, so she was well aware of how said condition was not improving as rapidly as she would have liked.

Ideally, unfortunate coincidences in Beryl's past aside, she would have preferred to stay in that nice, verdant ice-egg until Beryl was fully lucid and back to normal before attempting to leave. She suspected that was the usual routine, if such a thing happened often enough to be considered normal. Given how close she and Beryl had come to dying before getting far enough into the ice territories, she doubted they were meant to leave immediately.

The guardian's people left her and Beryl in the tunnel leading away from the massive, seemingly endless ice caverns. They parted ways with a warning snarl on the part of their guides, and an annoyed growl from Lily herself. She watched as the two white shapes disappeared into the hazy distance.

Then she rounded on Beryl and butted her head against his side, checking his reactions. Or, in this case, his lack of reaction, as he barely moved and didn't ask her what she was doing. She pawed at his chest, then pressed her face against his, but all he did was back up a bit, unsteady on his paws.

"Are you in there?" she asked quietly. He was just recovering, it might take a while yet, the guardian had said she would fix him despite her dislike for him…

He didn't answer, and she resolutely shoved down any hint of doubt in her heart. He was cured, he would snap out of this fugue state and come back to her, and if that did not happen she would do whatever it took to get the guardian to fix him properly. He and his family had proved her kind could die, so she had something to fear. That was a point of leverage Lily could and would use if it came to that.

But for now, she wanted to get away from the cold. She nudged his rear hard enough that he started walking into the tunnel, then leaped over him to lead the way. Thankfully, he followed, though at a very slow pace.

O-O-O-O-O

Lily remembered making it back to the river tunnel. She remembered Beryl still being out of it, though less so than before. She remembered putting him to sleep after coaxing him to eat a few fish…

And she remembered falling asleep of her own accord for the first time in what felt like forever. When she woke, it was to a deep, personal feeling of relief. A weakness she had been forced to live with, plan around, and agonize over was gone. In that, at least, the guardian had delivered despite her misgivings.

It was the lesser of the two problems they had come all this way to solve, though. She glanced over at where Beryl had been.

He was gone.

She stood, shook herself, and padded out to the end of the ledge to look around. His jet-black form was nowhere to be seen down below, not by the river or in the air. She leaped out into the open, snapping her wings out to catch the air, and circled down, checking all of the many, many naturally formed ledges he might have for some reason flown to.

Fear wormed its way into her heart as she failed to spot him. Any number of things could have gone wrong. He might be gone, missing or even dead–

"Lily!" The joyous cry came from above, the only direction she had not checked, and when she twisted around to look she saw him diving down from the icy entrance to the cold territories, headed right toward her.

He didn't change his course, either, she had to duck out of the way to avoid a flying tackle in the most literal sense. "Beryl!" she roared hopefully. He knew her name. It was such a small thing, yet such a fundamentally important thing at the same time. He knew her name.

"You did it!" he roared up at her, spinning around in an impressive display of mid-air acrobatics that had him coming back up toward her much quicker than any normal turn would have. "I remember everything!" This time he slowed on the approach and when she tried to dodge out of the way he corrected and hit her, spinning so they were underside to underside and grabbing on with all of his limbs.

They fell for a heartbeat, him trapping her. His head was close to hers, his eyes wide. "Thank you," he whined in her ear, before letting go and letting her go back to flying normally.

Lily flailed for a moment before she could recover her flight, feeling a bit shaky on her wings after such a reckless, completely spontaneous stunt, but she didn't have the heart to be mad at him for it. Rather, she wanted to take in his enthusiasm, his relief…

It was over. The horrible nightmarish journey to save the one she loved was over. He was back.