"Hey Sato, you shouldn't be carrying that."
Ariel appeared at her side and reached for the bundle of firewood before Sato could protest, already taking half of it with the practiced efficiency of someone who has had this argument before and considers it settled.
"I'm fine," Sato said. "I can carry it. But since you insist."
"I do insist." Ariel fell into step beside her, glancing down. "How is the little one?"
Sato placed one hand on her belly. The roundness of it still surprised her sometimes the realness of it, the weight. "It won't be long now." She smiled. "I can feel her."
A shadow passed over the village.
Everyone looked up. The sky was clear. Nothing there. They looked at each other and looked away and went back to what they'd been doing.
Then the ground shook.
The impact came from nowhere a single concussive thud that threw people from their feet and sent the smaller huts collapsing inward. The gust of wind that followed took the rest, tearing through the village in a wave that stripped thatch and broke supports and raised a wall of dust across everything.
When the dust settled, the Dragon was there.
It stood on all fours at the edge of the village, its body so large that its shadow fell across every structure at once. It looked down at the village below it the way mountains look down at the things at their feet without particular interest, without hurry.
Sato was already moving.
"Sato!" Ariel grabbed her arm. "What are you doing."
"My husband is home…"
"He went with the hunters."
Sato stopped.
She turned back to the Dragon.
The Dragon turned to her.
Its gaze moved downward finding her belly, registering what it saw there, holding on it with a focus that was completely different from the indifferent sweep it had given the rest of the village.
It opened its jaws slowly. The opening was vast enough to contain her entirely shadow and warm breath and the darkness at the back of a throat that had never needed to be careful about anything.
Sato looked at Ariel.
The jaws closed.
The Dragon spread its wings the downdraft destroying what remained of the structures around it and lifted into the sky. It was gone before the dust had time to settle again.
Ariel stood in the wreckage of the village and stared at the sky where it had been.
Then she ran.
John was with the hunters when the tremor reached them a ripple through the earth, faint at this distance, but wrong in a way that made him straighten up before he knew why.
He looked toward the village. The sky above it was unsettled in a way that sky above villages is not supposed to be unsettled.
"I'm going back," he said. "Something isn't right."
He moved.
He almost ran directly into Ariel coming the other way she was on the ground before either of them could stop, and she looked up at him with the expression of someone who has been running toward something terrible and has only just remembered that telling someone is the next step.
"John!"
"Why are you running? Is the village under attack? Where is Sato?"
Ariel was crying. "A Dragon took her. It just…it took her and it flew."
John was already gone.
He found the village elders in the centre of what remained. They looked up when they felt his aura arrive before he did the weight of it settling over them like weather, unmistakeable, the particular pressure of someone who has spent years becoming very difficult to ignore.
"Which direction?"
"You must not go," one of them said. "The village needs its protector. You cannot…"
John looked at them.
The elder's voice stopped on its own.
After a moment the other elder raised one arm slowly and pointed.
John was gone before the arm came back down.
The elders stood in the ruined village and breathed.
The Dragon's lair was cut into the rock face of a ridge three hours' flight from the village which meant considerably less time for John. He found the cave opening and walked into the dark.
Sato was on the ground.
He crossed the distance and dropped to his knees beside her, his hands on her shoulders, saying her name. She stirred. Her eyes opened found his face and the smile that came was the one he knew, the one that meant she was herself and present and here.
She tried to sit up.
Her hand found something on the ground beside her.
A sword. Long, substantial, its blade a deep consuming red with black flames carved into the surface in patterns that moved differently depending on how the light from the cave entrance found them. It looked like something that had been waiting not abandoned, not lost, but placed.
"Where did that come from?" John asked.
Sato looked at it. The cave. The space where the Dragon had been. She looked at her own hand still resting on the hilt.
Everything came back at once the jaws, the dark, the voice. My name is Oblivion. The warmth of something vast and ancient moving through her and into the child she was carrying. The ground coming up to meet her. And then John's voice, which was the first thing after.
She looked at John.
"I remember," she said.
Before that in the hours between Ariel running and John finding the cave.
Sato had come out of the Dragon's jaws covered in its warmth, coughing, onto the floor of the lair. She looked up at the creature above her and thought Why didn't it kill me?
"What are you?" she asked.
The silence lasted long enough that she thought there would be no answer.
"My name is Oblivion," the Dragon said.
It speaks. She held onto that thought and kept her breathing steady. "My name is Sato."
"Sato." The Dragon's voice was low and resonant, carrying the particular weight of something very old that has been patient for a very long time. "I need your child to become my successor."
"No."
Oblivion moved closer not aggressively, but with the simple certainty of something that is not accustomed to being told no and is not particularly threatened by it. "I am not asking. She will accomplish things I can see from here that you cannot yet imagine. I know this."
Sato's hand went to her belly. She felt the child move a small interior shift, present and alive and entirely unaware of the negotiation happening on her behalf.
She, she thought. And despite everything, she almost laughed.
She looked at the Oblivion. If I refuse, it kills us both. If I accept..
She thought about the child. About what she wanted for her. About the word strong and what it would mean to grow up carrying it rather than reaching for it.
"Alright," she said.
Oblivion lowered its head until it was level with her. "When the transfer is complete I will give my power and my consciousness entirely to your daughter. My body will reform as a sword one that only she can carry." The vast eyes held hers. "You will keep it for her until she is ready."
Sato closed her eyes.
The warmth came slowly at first then all at once, moving through her like light through water, finding the child within her and settling there with the permanence of something that has finally arrived where it was always going. Sato felt her legs stop working. The ground came up to meet her and she let it.
The last thing she heard was the sound of something enormous becoming something else.
John tried to pick up the sword. It didn't move not heavy exactly, just entirely uninterested in being moved by him, the way certain things simply belong to certain people and make no effort to pretend otherwise.
Sato picked it up with one hand.
She looked at it for a long moment. At the red blade. The black flames that shifted. The weight of it, which felt less like carrying something and more like being completed.
Then she looked at John and told him everything.
Sato talked as John carried her through the forest, the sword resting across her lap, her voice low and steady. She told him everything Oblivion's voice, the warmth of the transfer, the child she was carrying and what had been placed inside her. The forest moved past them and John listened without interrupting, which was the thing she had always loved most about him.
They reached the village late at night.
Ariel saw them from across the ruined yard and ran. She covered the distance without slowing and wrapped both arms around Sato before either of them could speak, holding on with the particular force of someone who has been imagining the worst for hours.
"I thought you were gone," she managed.
"I'm here," Sato said. "I'm fine."
The elders were waiting.
They followed them into one of the surviving huts and sat down in the lamplight, the elders arranged across from them with the careful expressions of people who have questions they have already half-answered themselves.
"Sato." The eldest spoke first. "The Dragon swallowed you. We all saw it. How are you here?"
John answered before Sato could. "It must have saved her. When I arrived it was asleep she was in a pile with others it had taken. She was alive. I got her out while it slept." He met the elder's eyes without difficulty. "We were fortunate."
He stood. "My wife has had a long day. We're done for tonight."
He walked out. Sato followed, her hand finding his on the way through the door.
Behind them the eldest elder sat very still and looked at the space they had left.
A Dragon the size of our village, he thought, saving something to eat later. He looked at his hands. You're hiding something, Sato. Both of you.
They slept at Ariel's hut. The village was quiet around them, the damage done and the living counted and the fires out. John lay in the dark listening to his wife breathe and thought about everything she had told him in the forest.
Then Sato made a sound that wasn't sleep.
He turned. She was crying quietly, the kind of crying that tries not to be heard, which was worse than the other kind.
"What's wrong?"
She pressed her face against his chest. "What if she's born a monster? What if what's inside her what if it changes her into something."
John put his arms around her and held her the way you hold someone when words are the wrong tool for the job. He felt her shaking slowly still.
"She won't be," he said. "She'll have her mother's face. Her mother's heart." He felt Sato's breath hitch. "Whatever else she has it'll be hers. She'll decide what to do with it."
Sato laughed despite herself a small, wet, genuine sound. She wiped her face against his shirt.
The night took them both.