Degre sat atop the edge of a lichenized boulder, one leg dangling into the free air hundreds of feet above the tops of the highest conifers below. The other was tucked up against his chest, booted heel dug into the granite as he curled his off hand and his pipe about his knee.

The view was spectacular from this height, and he was enjoying a minute to simply enjoy it after long, hard climb. When he was a young man, he had never had heights like this. The air had never been fresh like this. The world had never been alive like this, perhaps because his forebears of epochs long gone had destroyed that which had been theirs and then built themselves a raft to rule over Atu's ruin. Emperors of old bones, his genetic legacy. He was glad that their rule had been smashed, even if he remained. He would never ruin this place the way his forebears had thoughtlessly ruined a world before him.

Degre brought his pipe up to his mouth, and after he'd taken a slow draw, one fat glob of near-freezing water dashed itself against the matte bronze of his cyborware hand. He puffed out a long stream of white smoke in irritation. Home had never had weather like this, at least not without perfect timing and localization. Not to say that he couldn't weather a storm, but Degre had a feeling that this fat droplet, and those that had followed this vanguard, were a more pointed, conscious dig at his presence.

"Don't suppose you could see your way to fairer weather," he called, looking up. He had set his wide-brimmed cap to one side, weighed under a climbing peg from his pack, but as a crack of thunder answered him and the rain began to plaster the salt and pepper streaks of his thin hair he shoved it over his brow and gave a grunt of disapproval in return.

A rather closer rumble came from behind him, blocking the path from his perilous perch. Degre took a last puff from his pipe before tapping it out, and he didn't turn, not much. He scritched at his black beard, then cast over his shoulder, "Therque, pleasure as always."

~ Why do you enter our territory, Degre? ~ the voice that entered his mind as not one even telepathic sentence, but a fracture of thoughts that sought consensus. They revealed their hand, that way, showing a gradation of concern towards fear and rage. Beyond all, the voices were large, large in a way that put Degre's deepest instincts into a panic.

He took a breath in, breathed slow. He was used to mastering the impossible, to quelling beasts so much more threatening than his animal hindbrain could hope to conquer. But... hell if Therque's verbal growls did not unnerve him. He said, "Here for the view. Nothing more. Your mentor's displeased? Or pleased, perhaps? I can never tell, with her." It was an old conversation. Degre climbed the cliffs, and either he was told to go, or not. Very few other humans challenged the storm-wracked peaks. Degre stood apart from other humans.

He felt the presence of a predator's head longer than he was tall loom behind him, and he anchored himself against a great, billowing whuff of Therque's breath. One more of those and was likely to take a long tumble and a quick stop off the side of the mountain. Thankfully, the crimson snout laid up nearby, enough that Therque's blue well of an eye could peer at him, liquid and depthy. Degre turned his head enough to see that another of Therque's heads had settled in on the other side of the rocky spit. He consigned himself to his fate, a guest of the dragon, whether wanted to be or not. ~ Suletu does as she pleases, ~ Therque said, his mind-voices converging on Degre in that unusual way. ~ I ask once again, why do you enter our territory? ~

"And I tell you again, I come for the view." Degre shifted back a degree, ever wary of Therque's moods. "Valley's quiet for now. Westridge seems calm."

~ No pirates? ~

"Not anymore." Degre shifted his matte bronze hand, feeling the shape of the canon beneath his faux flesh. Whether one reigned in celestial sovreignty or one tore at the roots of that cursed throne, nobody liked a pirate. Nobody from Star City liked a pirate after what they had turned the station into. "I wanted to find somewhere to look on what I'm still doing all of this for."

~ Hmm. ~ Therque's snouts had come to a rest over the scrub of the outjutting rock, and Degre felt the pelting rain subside in his locality. If he had to guess, at least one of Therque's other heads was hovering overhead, providing shelter of a sort from the respiteless rain. ~ Do you seek to speak to her? ~

Degre considered it. He hadn't started his climb to hold audience with a trickster god. He knew that Suletu'kee had claimed a home among these jagged peaks, yet so had so many other dragons and their close kin. Nidus Descendi, some miles east and a little north, was home to a diaspora of dragonkind that might be counted as a city of its own. The world was big, even this little part of it, and Degre found the sense of being so insignificantly small to be grounding in a way he'd have quailed at when he was younger. Yet he knew that he had never shaken that sense of belonging that he attributed to any place he set his boots, whether it belonged to someone else or not. A quirk in his makeup, perhaps, or a curse inherited from his forebears... but that he should have thought to ask before he entered Suletu'kee's stomping grounds had never entered his mind.

"Maybe I do," he allowed. He'd shorn his own metaphorical roots so long ago, fallen upon his own mortality when he chose to foresake his inheritance by fighting with the uprising at Star City, that he liked to think he'd learned a thing or two about humbling himself. He carefully got to his feet, hearing the pneumatic hiss and pull of his old knees as they adjusted for him. "Maybe I do," he repeated. Therque was looking down upon him from above, he could now see, and from either side as well. "Maybe I seek to speak to you both."

~ You are the strangest human I have ever met, Degre, ~ Therque said. ~ The only one who would choose to walk to inaccessible heights simply to say hello. ~

"A man must make good with his friends from time to time," Degre allowed. Therque snorted again, and Degre's cloak billowed out over the abyss. He caught his hat just in time before it flew off and away from him, and he said, "and Therque needs a friend, strange or no."

~ Therque is well enough with his own company, ~ one of the dragon's head's snapped, while the rest whuffed in laughter. He offered a massive paw, and Degre stepped nonchalantly upon it.

They rode the blustery winds together with Degre little more than in interesting bug in Therque's cupped hands, and arrived in the lair of the trickster-thunderbird just as the sleet and lightning-laced clouds closed in on all sides. This high up, snow kept tenuous court on all of the peaks, marred here and there only by massive pawprints. The cleft into Suletu'kee's cavern was narrow for a beast like Therque, yet massive for someone of Degre's size. As he was set down, Degre sighed to himself and straightened his pack on his shoulders, resettling his heavy cloak.

Therque left him at the entrance, which was just as well. Degre could not hope to keep pace with someone so much larger than him, so he followed at a safe distance behind Therque's stinger-sharp tail tips. The inner workings of the thunderbird's keep were alien, but home enough to Degre's soul that he instantly felt at ease. Granite walls had been cloven by massive claws, then glassed with the grit of their cleaving in such a way to make them sparkle in light. And light there was: Suletu had brought enough electrical power to her keep to power a small space station. A low thrum, somewhere deeper in the mountain, spoke to the workings of a generator that Suletu'kee had taken off a pirate ship. Wiring recessed into artfully carved clefts fed the soft white light bathing Suletu's keep, the exact same breed of luminescence that Degre had grown up with in space. In as far as a hole in the mountain was, Suletu'kee had managed to keep a part of Star City alive in a way that many of its diaspora hadn't been able to.

Degre caught himself reminiscing with the usual painful emotional stab that came with it, and once again had to pull the shattered remains of his heart together, lest the trickster catch him in a vulnerable state.

He gave an impassive bow when the thunderbird approached, the smile of a king creasing his wide cheeks and creasing, too, the grooves in his skin where wires of another kind had once marked him as divinely appointed.

The thunderbird positively crowed when she spotted her new guest. She returned his bow with a deeply sarcastic cant of her own forelegs, beak agape with delight. When she spoke, Degre could see a crimson light that rose from her throat, and could smell the ozone that rolled off her in waves. "Emperor, how high thou hast climbed, and what effort in thine own feeble body? From trough trough hast thou hast though raised thineself, toiling to seek my lowly company?"

"It's always a pleasure," Degre said, placidly tolerant despite Suletu's antics.

"Oh, thine to mine, truly," Suletu churred. She brought her wing-arms up, those naked things free of webbing or feathers. Striking her knuckles brought forth a holographic shower of red sparks and red light. She spread her now vibrantly glowing wings wide and bathed Degre in a crimson light. A beat shook him, and Degre found himself with disorienting realness squeezing through a choked byway, a bloodied bar in his hands, a klaxon reverberating, red bathed in light undifferentiated from Suletu'kee's wings. Adrenaline spiked, heart pounded, and his ragged stump of an arm thrummed as it sought to activate defense mechanisms that had been stripped from him when he'd been placed under arrest. He was fighting tooth and claw to escape the failing space station-- no, he had been fighting to escape the station when it had gone down and he had not escaped cleanly. He recalled himself, blinking out of the past and into the present once more.

The klaxon's bleating was only Suletu'kee's cackle, the light not the emergency red of failing life support, but the energy of the trickster goddess' wings. Degre flushed in shame for his lapse, though he hoped he had borne himself well enough through it. "--and what sayest thou to that, majesty?" Suletu'kee crackled.

"Your pardon?" Degre asked, realizing too late that Suletu'kee had been speaking all the while.

The bird cast him a prying look, then turned and ushered him deeper into her den, where Therque had found his rest upon one massive, stone-hewn nest. "Only that thine empire has taken root piecemeal though it may be. It flourishes, last I checked." When Degre cast her a skeptical look, Suletu'kee grinned brightly. "Oh, yes. Curious?"

"I admit... I am." He thought carefully: why offer up this information to him? He knew that Suletu'kee was a trickster, and that she liked to play her sides... yet Degre was no longer on any side. He had made his peace with Nidus Descendi by joining the throngs of refugees who'd been given another chance here. In eleven years, he had shorn his hair, he had removed all accounts of his origins to take up the life of a ranger, at least where he was able. His blood still coursed with the technology that had meant to keep him at the head of an empire, cyborware that he could never fully destroy without ending his own life. He had sought to disavow himself of his role long ago, but it was hard to escape his implanted ID's. How did one fake one's way out of being an emporer?

By traveling, it turned out.

By making onesself a stranger.

By disavowing himself of the need for compatriots. Degre was older, now, and what friends he'd had as a young man had all died or betrayed him. And yet...

And yet. "You've been keeping track? Of the diaspora, I mean?"

" Oh yes," Suletu'kee grinned. She settled in front of Therque's nest, crossing her forearms as she regarded the human. "Yes I have, and news have I for thee. In far off climes, on far off worlds, a seed has sprouted and bloomed, watered by tears and remorse and a need to do better."

Degre raised his thick brows, the scars across them raising with. "And today's entertainment is in my pondering what exactly you mean, then?"

"No," Suletu'kee said. She cast a sly look over her shoulder at Therque, and then snatched Degre up in her claw. She was not nearly as large as the crimson beast she'd mentored, yet still her grasp was enough to bring Degre some amount of trepidation. "My entertainment, your majesty, is in sheparding you to enlightenment." A crackle of energy that rendered him fully pins-and-needles left him also unable to act, and a moment longer there was nothing for it but to give in to Suletu'kee's trickery. The world fell away from them both as she spread her wings, a darkness more empty than the vacuum of the crypts of his forebears sweeping them out of space and time.