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Twilight tainted the skies a dark violet, threatening nightfall. The rising moon's pale light added a hue of weak illumination, something Sarthinas was thankful for as it was just enough to guide their progress toward the timber village, but meek enough to not highlight their approach.

Eighty paces from the corpse pile, they stood a short distance from the initial two wooden buildings. An arched walkway bridged between the roofs, and a dark silhouette lingered in the centre up there, pacing back and forth between a pair of relit torches.

"Bastards! Accursed bastards! What did I warn you? None of you listened, none! This all your faults!" It shouted, its voice hoarse and its tone manic.

Sarthinas put an arm out in front of Tetsomos. He was able to make out the walkway loiterer was a species like he, a bipedal dragon, with a crossbow cradled in its arms as it turned their way for a brief moment. Unlike what he expected, the crossbow wielding dragon turned right back around.

"Make it stop! MAKE IT STOP!"

It clutched at its head and paced the length of the walkway, then returning to its original position, looked down into the village. Sarthinas followed its sightline down to the central lane of the village. There he spotted a gathering of three villagers, a wolf, a boar and a bull, soft torch light revealing their bloodied clothes and haggard faces. No matter the colouration of their fur, they shared a blackened crescent under their eye sockets, a deep inset like a bruise that made their eyes seem sunken into hollows. They stared up at the walkway dragon, a glazed, vacant, stupid expression on their muzzles. They clutched a combination of dual axes, a two handed wide woodsaw and a pitchfork.

Then came the snap of the crossbow mechanism and the following thunk of a bolt. The boar dropped its pitchfork and stumbled backward, slamming into a nearby wooden building wall. None of the other villagers reacted; they stood, static and impassive. Sarthinas opened his jaws with a frown of horror on his eye ridges.

"Tell me this is not usual." Tetsomos said.

"Far from it." Sarthinas replied.

The crossbow dragon reloaded while it whispered to itself, Sarthinas picked up nonsensical fragments of mad gibberish. There was no doubt another villager would fall, they had to move. Sarthinas sucked in breath, patted Tetsomos on the chest, and darted toward the congregation, his left arm over his belly and the left paw curled around Sovereign Spite's sheathed sword grip.

The dual axe wielding wolf hooked its arm back.

"No!"

And threw one such axe up at the crosswalk dragon, blade head and handle flipping in a deadly spin. The dragon shunted back into the crosswalk's timber banister and broke through it, dropped through the air, and landed with a heavy thump a couple of paces from where Sarthinas cut his sprint and skidded on the mud. He grimaced at the axe head jutting from the dragon's skull.

"What insanity is this?" Sarthinas said to the wolf and bull.

The pair stared at him. He marched forward.

"Answer me."

He pointed with a talon first to the fallen boar, then to the dragon, fresh bright blood oozing from their corpses.

"Well?!"

As if to answer him, a replication of the screaming howl blasted from the Isolated Temple through the village. Sarthinas had to turn away from it while cupping his ears. Tetsomos ducked the front of his body down and likewise covered his ears with his fores, but kept his eyes on the villagers. Mercifully, this knell was curter.

"SARTHINAS!" Tetsomos roared over the residual ringing.

Sarthinas spun, drawing his sword and catching a downward axe swing. He shifted his eyes between each of the wolf's and saw a livid fire there, like a soldier with a combat high.

A call to arms?

He shoulder barged the wolf back with a grunt. Tetsomos was at his side in moments.

"Can you fight?" Sarthinas asked while untying the support string on his sword sheath.

"I can." Tetsomos nodded.

"Don't kill them," Sarthinas unhooked Sovereign Spite's sword sheath and held it out ready, while he swapped the actual sword to his left paw. "They are without their entire faculties, I think."

The wolf came back at him with a haphazard swing, which Sarthinas took a simple step back to avoid. A swipe aimed at his gut followed. He blocked it, his steel biting the neck of the axe. It took little strength to disarm the wolf, the axe flung into the mud.

_ They are just villagers._

Sarthinas relaxed his stance. He watched Tetsomos deliver a backpawed hook at the bull's cheek after the beast missed an attack. The large villager swayed, and Tetsomos drove him to the ground with a balance busting tail swipe.

His own opponent hadn't lost aggression even unarmed; the wolf flung itself at him, clawing at the air in front of his face and neck. Inspired by Tetsomos, Sarthinas sent the villager to the mud with a low spinning tail sweep.

"Stop this." Sarthinas warned.

Both the wolf and bull ignored him, beginning to heft themselves up. Tetsomos put his fores on the bull's arms, pinning it, and giving a warning growl. The wolf rose up like a necromancer's plaything, mud clumped in its fur and caked across its eyes, yet it set on him all the same.

"This is going to give you rough sleep."

Sarthinas initiated an arc swing with the wooden sheath, primed for a skull rattling knock out.

"Sleep." The wolf said.

Sarthinas stopped.

"What? Sleep?"

The bull wiggled under Tetsomos's pin.

"Sleep" it groaned.

"Let us sleep." The wolf added.

Sarthinas looked from wolf to bull and back again, examining the puffy black crescent under their eyes and the streaks of blood veins in the eye whites. Then he looked up the main village lane, to the dividing woods and beyond, to the visage of the looming Isolated Temple.

"The knells. They aren't compelling you to combat, they are starving you of rest."

"Our sleep is for the Pierced." The wolf villager stated.

Not starving them of rest, siphoning it. They really are here.

Insomnivores, the sleep gorging cult of The Pierced. As improbable as it seemed for them to have infiltrated the Isolated Temple, this was their method of attack. Sarthinas blew out a breath and conjured the mirage of the memory he had had earlier. He, Centreya and a scout unit, five in total, camped in a decrepit mill house. A faint, distant wail echoed through the land in the depth of night. His eyes had shot open, his unit had roused, but Centreya had told them to go back to sleep. She went out, and sure enough, sleep found him again. She returned by dawn, and they never heard such a wail again.

What has happened here? Why has Centreya and the Confounders not quelled these Insomnivores?

"Tetsomos, we must get to the Temple."

The blue nodded, maintaining his pin on the restless bull villager. Sarthinas tightened his grip on the sword sheath.

"We can give these villagers their due rest, though unfortunately not as gently as natural sleep would have it."

This time he completed the swinging arc. The wood sheath connected at the wolf's skull with a wince inducing crack, the force of the blow shuddering up his arm. The villager collapsed sideways, unconscious before he hit the mud. Tetsomos tilted his head as he watched.

"Believe me, this is a necessity. Insomnivores, the creatures that howl, are keeping the people of this village in perpetual insomnia. It fuels their craft. I am ignorant on the intricacies of how, but the why is so they can endow themselves with the ability to blur a victims ability to distinguish between dream and reality."

Sarthinas gazed at the dark bulk of the Isolated Temple.

"I thought she was immune to the distortion." He thought aloud.

Tetsomos turned his attention to the bull under his weight, curled the digits on a paw into as much of a fist as his long talons would allow, and delivered a rather deft strike to the villager's temple. Instant knock out. Sarthinas barked out a surprised laugh.

"A skilled strike." He said.

Tetsomos craned his head and flicked his tail, a subtle smirk on his maw.

An Insomnivore knell ripped through the village. Sarthinas snarled and shook his head against it. He staggered to a snarling Tetsomos and gave the blue a reassuring couple of pats to the shoulder, and motioned to the dividing woods with Sovereign Spite.

***

Frail torch flames were dotted throughout the main central lane, jabbing at the night and revealing the shambling shadows of sleep starved villagers. Another Isomnivore scream tore out from the direction of the dividing woods and the Isolated Temple. Once its assault dampened, there was the squeak and trickle of a turning water wheel intermingled with the crackle of flame. A blessed respite to their ears as the dragons made their way to the dividing woods.

Between them, Sarthinas and Tetsomos had granted abrupt sleep to eighteen villagers, of which all had approached armed and mad with insomnia. A languid congregation dogged them behind, their shuffling steps slopping through the mud, at a pace too slow to catch up with the dragons. Sarthinas snatched a torch from outside the entrance of a workshop of some kind.

When he put a foot on the grass pricked soil of the dividing woods, their pursuers retreated.

"They respect this boundary even in their current state." Sarthinas said.

"I feel unwise not doing the same." Tetsomos said.

Sarthinas nodded and drew in a breath, tasting clean air threatded with pine and humidity that tickled the back of his throat with moisture.

"Indeed. I'm afraid it is our way forward though."

Sarthinas gave the blue a reassuring smile and nod. Tetsomos shook layers of mud off his hindpaws and returned the nod. Then, they moved into the woods proper.

Trees were huddled together like frightened cubs, so dense the dragons had to weave through them. Rogue hanging foliage brushed at their faces, leaving drooling dew drops on their scales. Absolute darkness filled any gap in the tree trunks, a darkness untainted by any light other than their single flame. They tainted the silence too; the crunching of browned leaves and long dead branches snapping under their paws as they made way.

A mammoth tree came into view, its trunk wide enough to rival any castle turret Sarthinas had ever seen. He ran his paws along the bumps and ridges of its barky skin as he rounded it. He checked on Tetsomos behind him. The meek torch flame illuminated only blackness, not a hint of blue scale in sight.

"Tetsomos?"

Sarthinas retraced his steps back around the stout tree trunk, an instinctive paw hovering over the sheathed Sovereign Spite. He heart beat pounded in his ears and twitched behind the scales at his neck. Faster, harder. He had to use a paw to brace himself against the tree trunk, a wave of muscle weakening fatigue washing through him. He blinked and swooned in place.

I'm paying the price for not eating or drinking since this morning. Since I had seen him.

Balenu.

The thought had been inexplicable, yet it sent jolts of misery through his being. A slow hot pain eradiated from inside his chest, it felt like long dormant bamboo seeds sprouted, growing in his heart, skewering its walls with their sharp shoots.

Why is this happening now? I have to put this aside.

He betrayed me. I loved him. I loved him more than anything.

"I loved you." He whispered.

"And I love you."

Cracks of twigs sounded to his side. Out from the gut of darkness, what began as a misty apparition materialized on the skirts of the torch's light, then on every one of its steps closer, detailed into a man. A human man. Sarthinas put his back to the enormous tree trunk, his eye ridges pulled high and his jaw working in silence.

"This can't be. Balenu."

The man showed a half smile while he brushed a pair of wayward hairs hanging on his forehead back in line with the rest of his hair.

"Why can't this be? Do you not deserve to see me, or me you?"

It isn't him. It isn't him. It isn't him.

He wanted nothing more than to reach out and cup those soft human cheeks with his paws. He wanted nothing more than to feel the living heat of his love weave through his scales.

To hold him, one last time.

It isn't him!

"An Insomnivore has a line of sight on me, then. You are an imitation of Balenu." Sarthinas whispered, his voice wavering.

"Body guarding me has made you suspicious, I hate it caused such a trait in you. The weight of leadership took its toll on both of us, eroding who we once were. Do you ever wish we could just go back to being those content lovers sneaking off into the mountain caves?"

"Of course I do."

Don't talk with it.

Him. Balenu.

"You are not here." Sarthinas whispered.

"Dear, first you accuse me of brokering with the Pierced, and now there is the allegation I am a phantom?"

"You did reach a deal with the Pierced, consigning my kin to oblivion. You are a phantom."

A renewed strength and resolve cleared his mind, bringing with it a clarity and certainty. That was, until Balenu took a closer step forward, a sincere expression on his face, his gaze keen and determined.

"Am I?"

The torch flame flickered in his eyes, lightening the dark grey of his irises. Sarthinas gritted his teeth behind clamped jaws and gripped the talons on his spare paw into the tree bark behind him. His breath came in quick puffs through his nostrils, his heart drummed hard again and his stomach contracted tight.

Balenu took another step closer.

Instinct screamed at Sarthinas to act, to shove Balenu away, but an overwhelming, more potent force compelled him to allow Balenu to get close. Toe to toe, Balenu's nose pressed between his nostrils, skin kissing scales.

"It's me, my Sarthinas."

Sarthinas swallowed.

"No."

With a blink, a tear from each eye ran down his cheek scales like the humidity dew had done before. A maelstrom of misery, anger, love, despair, disbelief and desire collided like debris in a vortex within him, laying waste to his emotional landscape.

"Touch me."

"I can't, you're not real."

"You feel my lips so close to yours, can't you? You can feel my breath."

Sarthinas closed his eyes, bracing against the internal storm to find a glimmer of strength to empower his scepticism.

Remember what Centreya taught you of their craft.

Obfuscation, illusion, blurring, manipulation, the focused rioting of emotions to paint the lie. Tools that dominate perception and lure the believer, for despair or hope. It lures the desperate, the lost, the heartbroken.

Yet.

Yet, there was air touching his lips, a warm rush of it that had not been there before.

Breath.

"I need you. I love you." Balenu said.

Sarthinas blinked away a faster falling set of tears and eased his clutch on the bark. He dropped the torch and put both paws up to the sides of Balenu's head. Living warmth caressed his scaled hands as he laid his palms on the Balenu's cheeks. Sarthinas let out a choked sob.

"See, Sarthinas? It's me, I'm with you."

Sarthinas shook his head, tear drops shedding off his chin.

"No. No, Balenu, you're not."

As the man's brow creased into a frown, Sarthinas drove his claws into his skull and yanked, pulling at his right shoulder, side stepping at the last moment so the human forehead slammed into the thick tree trunk. As the man's head recoiled off the bark, Sarthinas pivoted, unsheathed Sovereign Spite, roared his anguish and cleaved in a diagonal slash. Skin, bone, and vicera parted against his furious power from shoulder to hip, where Sarthinas lost the strength to make the cleave clean and entire. Sobs he had tried to stifle escaped his throat in heavy, painful whimpers. He wobbled back from the half-shorn human body, Sovereign Spite remained lodged in the hip bone. The man slumped against the tree, sliding down, Balenu's slicked back waves of hair melting to baldness, a halo of dark studs ridged around the skull cap.

I was right.

Sarthinas crumpled to his knees splashed in gore. He bowed his head. A pair of blue wings enclosed around him.