It is so dark, Reon thought, that I cannot tell if my eyes are open or closed. It is so cold, that I can barely tell if I am moving. There is no feeling anywhere in my body.

       He tried to think about his eyes. Open them. Open them. But there was no sensation.

       It is always like this. Always. It will never change. Soon the heat will start, thought Reon, and I will pray for it to stop. And when the cold comes again, I will pray for the heat. There is no end. No end.

       Now. It starts.

       He felt a warm glow at his core. This is the only moment of comfort, Reon thought. The beginning never lasts long. It grew hotter and sharper inside. Reon felt his eyes open. He knew for certain now: a red-orange glow fell against the rock wall that hemmed him in. Reon could see the splintered granite surfaces pointing at him, hemming him in.

       The glow grew brighter. The burning began. Like a dull headache at first, then hotter, hotter, searing hot, white hot. It cut through his skull. It spilled like molten bronze down his throat. It cascaded over his lungs like flaming steel. It filled his heart with the flaming agony of a thousand burning suns.

       The flames jumped out from his eyes, licked at the spines on his cheeks, wrapped around the sharp horns on his skull, spurted from between his sharp teeth. A column of flame rose as Reon opened his mouth in a soundless scream.

       Already the flames trickled out from the slots where his ribs should have been. Layer on layer of sharp, scaly spines floated in the fire.

       The pain was unbearable. It cut through every metalized sinew of his body. The shiny, chitinous thing that Reon had become reflected and absorbed its own heat. It consumed him and created his own agonies.

       Reon could see the whole of the rock cave that held him. How long had it been? How long since I froze into this most recent sleep? Hours? Months? Centuries?

       He had been so close the last time he had awakened. He had almost succeeded, and then it went wrong. The quarry had escaped. Escaped. Escaped, again.

      The rocks shook. The rumble of an earth tremor rattled the cave. I can feel him, Reon said to himself. He is near. They are both near. I will find them and be free!

       He reached up with his clawed hands and grasped a rock, pulling himself to a standing position.

       Another shockwave shot through the granite. With a grinding crunch, a crack opened in the roof of the cave.

       Slowly, carefully, Reon eased his body into the opening. He grasped at sharp protrusions of rock. He pulled himself upward through the darkness illuminated by the red light from his eyes.

       Reon crept along passages that ran off in as many directions as the cracks in a broken mirror. He was only a tiny black crawling thing, compared to the mountain of rock that covered him.

       Then there was a puff of moving air. Reon was so hot now that he could barely tell that it had touched him. But the flames stirred, and he knew there was a breeze. He was near the surface.

       Reon eased himself through a jagged opening. The world opened out in all directions. He was on a mountainside. But where? Where was he? What new world was this? When was this?

       He pulled himself to the top of a boulder to see.

      Like an angry blow, the sun smashed into his face. Reon fell back in agony, shielding his eyes with his hands. He dropped to the safety of the shadowed, rocky crevice from which he had emerged. His panicked breathing stirred the fire within him like a bellows in a forge. His flaming eyes were blind from the flash of sunlight. Stop, rest, wait. Soon the sun will be gone.

       Looking up the mountainside, Reon could see the orange glow slipping up into the darkening sky. The last boiling slice of the sun sank into the ocean.

       Reon rose to his feet as the darkness fell. Confident, he climbed to the top of the boulders and stood in the beginning of blackest night.

       Freedom again. He knew it in every crystal-hard fiber of his being. Free. Free to avenge. Free!

       Quivering with joy, Reon's mouth shaped into a smile pierced by crazed, razor teeth, washed by drooling flame. The final scarlet flicker of sun caught permanently in Reon's eyes. Stars danced in the newborn night and reflected on the obsidian surface of Reon's body.

       Below him, there was a valley. Beyond the valley, an ocean. What ocean? he wondered. My ocean? The ocean I will own? What land? My land? My land to claim at last?

       In the valley, a village. Lights flickered on in the windows. The buildings are strange. They are not like those I remember from the last time. But they always change. There are lights in these windows, bright like earthbound stars. And within the dwellings, will the beings have changed, too?

       No matter. There is only one I seek. He is here and not alone. I feel it. I know it! They are both here.

      A smile of hatred and glee rippled on his face. Reon looked down at the houses, searched from one to the next like a cat staring into the darkest shadows.

       His eyes stopped on a house at the cliff's edge. A house poised above the ocean. A house floating between the night and the waves of the sea. The feeling was strong from this place.

       His lungs pumped, stirring the fire back to his brain. A painful sound rasped in and out of his throat.

       I will say the name aloud, Reon thought. I will say it one more time. It will bring luck to the hunt. It is hard to speak at all. The fire consumes the words before they are spoken. But this hatred has form, and the word will make it true.

       He summoned his strength. His blistered tongue struggled in the flames. His heaving lungs pushed air toward his cracked metal lips.

       One word.

       Like a hiss of quenched steel.

      "Teefr…."

       And one more sound. A rasping laugh, scratching and sharp, rang over the mountainside like fingernails across a blackboard.

       The laugh shook even the shadows that swallowed Reon as he crawled back inside the mountain.

       Then the stillness of the night fell at last.
 

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