We'd tried everything.
Bought a fake—turned out to be from a soggy pond wyrm.
Tried to conjure one—summoned cursed maggots from the Great Library's rectal index.
Considered robbery. Considered lying. Considered maybe just dying and letting the hag stew us into tea.
None of it worked.
I sat cross-legged in the dirt, fingers tangled in my hair, trying not to scream.
The sky had that pre-dusk bruised look. One more sleep till the full moon. One more night before the hag came calling with her ladle and her debts and her particular way of pronouncing "consequence."
"I'm out of plans," I said flatly.
Dragon didn't respond. Just sat there, wings slack, tail twitching. Looking like an overgrown, traumatized paperweight.
"I mean it. That's the end of the list. We ticked all the boxes. Bought, forged, begged, ran. All we're missing is sacrificing a virgin, and I'm fresh out."
Still nothing.
I threw a pebble at him. "Say something."
He sighed. Deeply. Like the wind leaving a cathedral.
Then, low and reluctant:
"There is one more option."
I sat up. "What?"
He wouldn't look at me. "The sanctuary."
I blinked. "You mean—her sanctuary?"
He grunted. Noncommittal. Unhappy.
I squinted. "What, the real one? Aunt Threxaval's crystal doom-castle?"
A reluctant nod.
I stared at him.
"But that's at the edge of the world or... some pocket dimension held together by contempt and bone chairs."
He glanced at me sideways.
"It's three valleys over."
I blinked. "You're fucking kidding."
He shook his head once.
"You mean to tell me," I said, "that the divine monolith of aesthetic tyranny, the throne of ancestral dread, the bone-eating dragon matriarch's summer vacation lair... is literally within walking distance?"
He exhaled like someone peeling off a trauma scab.
"We're a local brood."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"And you didn't mention this why?"
"Because I didn't want to go," he snapped. "I still don't."
"But it's right there!"
"Yes. And that's exactly the problem."
I tilted my head. "You're scared."
"I am not scared," he growled. "I am... battle-weary from a lifetime of calculated humiliation at the hands of a creature who corrected my offering bowl placement at my own hatchling dedication."
"...That's not a thing."
"It is in our family."
I shifted to face him. "Wait—how many times have you actually been to the sanctuary?"
He didn't look at me.
"Too many," he said. "My first molt? Judged. My first crush? Mocked. My first attempt at poetry? She read it aloud to the Council of Ashes and annotated it in real time with a pointer made from one of my uncle's ribs."
I blinked.
He went on, as if pulled into some internal slideshow of horror.
"She calls me 'Junior.' Still. Every time. Once, I brought a perfectly respectable sacrificial goat—white coat, golden eyes, divinely sanctioned—and she sniffed it and said, 'Pedestrian.'"
I pressed my lips shut to avoid laughing. Barely.
"I brought her a gilded relic once," he said. "She didn't even unbox it. She just nodded to one of the servants and said, 'Return it to the gift shop. With shame.'"
I was shaking now.
"Every time I visit," he continued grimly, "I lose ten years off my pride. I go in a dragon. I come out a cautionary tale."
"And yet..." I said, standing slowly, "we're going."
He looked at me, wounded and betrayed.
"Saya, I don't think you understand what it means to stand in her presence. It's not awe. It's not fear. It's the sensation of being edited in real time."
I stepped forward. "We don't have a choice."
"There's always a choice."
"No," I said. "Not anymore. We're out of cons. Out of luck. Out of time."
He was silent for a long moment.
Then, quietly:
"If she makes me recite the Elegy of Bone in front of her vassals again, I'm turning you into soup."
I smiled gently.
"I'll add glitter to it."
He groaned.
I slung my pack over my shoulder.
"Three valleys, right?"
"Yes," he muttered. "Each one more judgmental than the last."
"Let's go."
He stood reluctantly. Wings twitching. Tail low. Like he was marching into a childhood playroom where every toy had been replaced with a performance review.
"Do not speak unless spoken to," he said.
"Copy that."
"And if she calls you 'delightfully rustic'—"
"I run?"
"You bow."
"Ugh. Fine."
We flew.
Three valleys.
Three stages of emotional decay.
Toward a dragon who names her teeth and destroys reputations with punctuation.