Chương 328: 5.7

Jewel stared at one of her closest friends. Happily chewing, her fur coat little changed from when they had last spoken. The almost milky brown color seemed good and healthy. Black soulful eyes and full lashes watching Jewel with amusement. The spring skies this morning, momentarily clear of clouds or rain, letting fresh early year sun shine down on the shed and the surrounding meadows still glistening with dew. Stinking as if Jewel had unleashed wyrmdoom on the farm.

The world was full of waking life, fresh shoots, tender leaves. No calamities, no forces of death, no gods descending, no sign or hint of sorcery or curse. Everything was at peace, except Jewel herself! The wyrm's flames rushed through her body and her heart pulsed in a thunderous beat. She had flown directly from Rochford that morning, just in case there was something she could do to help save Bethica, her friend from dying. But Bethica was not wracked by illness or suffering at all.

Not grievously wounded or even in any seeming pain. The cow was in fact looking quite healthy, although her foreleg was bound and splinted. And as such she was laying down in the shelter of her shed instead of out in the field as was her preference in spring. There was no waning corpse wracked by some accursed unknown horror as Jewel had feared. Not like the Lord Kliatbatrn. Bethica was perhaps a bit immobilized by her injured leg, but not suffering for lack of fodder.

Chewing grain with a contented smile as she looked up at Jewel with her family eye. Jewel could not stop the anguished cry from spilling past her lips.

"Bethica! Alexander said you were dying!" Her friend laughed, voice just as deep and strong as always.

"Well of course I'm dying Jewel, All folk are in one fashion or another dying. Even that magister of yours." Jewel glared at the cow in her shed, who leaned over to eat another mouth full of grain, chewing noisily without even lifting away.

"Bethica, he said you were dying this year!" To which her friend made an agreeing noise in her throat before raising her snout out of the trow, licking her lips and then chewing a moment longer before swallowing hard.

"I should hope so! It will be a good year for it I think!" The tone of her friend's voice struck Jewel, the words were happy, at peace, almost excited. Jewel had seen death so many times, the old struggled to gasp, the cold slaying the unwary in their sleep. She had never seen a happy death. Even the men taken by the veles more fell in mid step then in actual joy. All living things struggled. From the rabbit, to the boar, to the crawling things in the earth and every birds in the sky.

Every flower blooming in the fields around them strived to live, the wheat just pushing from the fields would cry out in pain in its own way even late into the year when it was cut down, but Bethica just declared her expected mortality with a smile. Jewel gaped at the cow. Who considered her with a gentle familiar eye, lips falling from the smile to knowing sadness.

"You were raised by the ver, who fight for their time. But that's not our way Jewel." The wyrm felt the words leaping from her tongue before she even knew what they would be.

"That's not anything's way Bethica! I can smell the screams of the grass on your teeth when you graze! Everything wants to live! You're fine, your bones are knitting together, why did you tell Alexander you would be dead this year!" There was a heavy sigh from her friend.

"Jewel, I am ten summers older than my mother was when her memory started to die while she lived. In five years from my age she could not even speak, but I could see the panic in her eyes. She knew what she was losing each year. Horrified by it as it devoured her from within." Her friend's voice was suddenly sombre.

"We are not like your ver, we are not like yourself Jewel, sons and daughters of our beautiful sire and all-mother we might be. But we do not live so long. We know this, the stories of our fathers and mothers tell us it is so. Have always warned us." She looked down at the splinted leg before snorting and looking back up at Jewel.

"I was warned in word and lore by my mother. But more so I was warned by my own eyes what death looks like if you linger after your time Jewel." Jewel stared at her friend, who could be so wise, and yet was in fact younger then Jewel herself by nearly a decade. Now speaking of her own death as an inevitable certainty. As if she was a crone. There were perhaps a few signs of gray aging to Bethica's fur but not anything to suggest she was destined to imminently perish within five years. Let alone this one.

Nothing sickened or cursed within her flesh that Jewel could feel. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Mother warned me just as I warned my daughters. If we do not find death at our time, it will drag its way into us. Steal our memories, our voices, every joy and love and sight until we are walking, breathing things yes. But empty ones, less than even our mute kin." The tone was soft, gentle, she offered Jewel an apologetic smile as if discussing an unfortunate accident. Not her own mortality.

"The only reason she held on so long was because she was desperate to try and give me another sibling that could speak. But It ruined her Jewel, I won't have that for myself, I won't have that for my daughters to have to suffer." The cow raised her head up and stared up at Jewel in her foreigner's eye and then her familial one.

"My warning to them of the price for cheating death will stay as words and stories only." Jewel stared at Bethica. The words drew her mind to the terribly hungry things, to the once-exiled prince Tepes and what he had volunteered to become in the Capital. What that had wrought. The Troubles. The unleashing of the hungry things which had almost sparked a war with Magarska. It made the eggs in Jewel's belly noticeably shift.

She turned her attention back to her friend, to the straw, to the crawling things in the earth beneath it. She focused on the broken bones, where they snapped, the hum of the world within them. Her friend's hairs were perhaps not as shining as they once had been, maybe there was a brittleness there that had been absent when they met? The more Jewel looked the more she wanted to keep staring, feeling, smelling.

The urge to sit there in silence and silently search for some hidden sign of curse or withering that could possibly justify her friends fear. But she did not see any great rent or failure in Bethica. the ruin of Lord Kliatbatrn and how she had sought and failed to find the cause of infirmity in him scratched, dragged, tried to drive her to look even deeper. To find some sourness in her scent, some subtle wrongness to the world about her. The moment of stillness loomed between them in a way it had not for years.

So she spoke.

"But why now! You haven't actually begun to lose anything have you?"

"Not that I can remember," her friend laughed from her bed of straw. But then there was worry to her tone, the first that Jewel had heard since her friend confirmed she was apparently destined to perish.

"But I wouldn't remember Jewel. Mother didn't realize it when it started happening to her. Celsus has done his best to help me know if I've gone past my destined day. But he's not known me long enough to be sure." For the first time there was a sadness to the topic as Bethica nosed her splinted leg.

"We can't be sure I've not already begun to slip away Jewel. It's been a weight on both Celsus and I, If we're already too late. But then I had a fall this spring and cracked my leg. And well it's not forgetting the line of my mothers or the iliad. But it's a sign all its own." She looked up to Jewel. Eyes brimming with a wetness that had not fully welled up to tears.

"It's a good year for it Jewel, my children are strong, my grand-children are due to be born this spring. Celsus is a wise bull and has taught them well beside me. It would be best to have the deed on the longest night or day. To a proper god. So this summer would be best." Jewel stared at Bethica, Celsus had always been strange, the sombre and insistent way he spoke about how he should die. How he would like to die under the knife of a priest and the exact manner in which his body was to be parceled.

It seemed like a jest before. But Bethica had never spoken up against her husband's insistence to fervently describe the correct manner he was to be butchered and eaten. The way to honor the dead of their people. The insistence they had about the correct way they were to die. It reminded Jewel of how the stories spoke of war. Of Honor, of battle, of the boasting of Knights. Jewel had always taken it as the same. A thing said but not felt or meant in deed. A sacrifice made in desperation only.

But looking down at her friend, who was smiling but with a very particularly pained look in her eye. Realizing that Jewel was being looked up with a twinge of pity. And not a single glint of fear. Jewel stared down at Bethica, at her friend who was in some ways closer than anyone she had ever known before. At the speaking cow who had taught her spawn self how to speak in turn. Who was happy in her shed on fresh straw and happily filling herself with last year's wheat grain and fresh spring leaves from the woods.

Confidently and joyously wanting to die. Planning the proper day for it like a festival. With the only sting to her scent that of pity at how she was hurting Jewel. And the only fear that she might live past this year. Jewel felt the will to hold herself up collapse, her coils thundering to the dirt of the road and the grass nearby Bethica's shed.

The impact of her body stinging ever so slightly all up and down the wyrm's torso, the tremor of it shaking the house and shed together in their timbers and her friend enough to draw a wince and slight clutching of her splinted foreleg closer to her side. The eggs in her belly jostled, Jewel should have feared for them but she just couldn't. Not against the enormity of unfairness that the world was laying upon her. Bethica lowered her head down to nuzzle at the side of Jewel's own snout and murmured softly.

"It's alright to miss me dear, it will be alright to shed your tears when I'm gone or even now, but we all have our time to go. Is it not better to be taken by a god to my final rest when I am still whole enough to know it?" Jewel looked up to her friend and could only just muster the will to nuzzle back, feeling the shame of tears filling her own eyes. Running free like fleeing levies across her face. She couldn't find the words. But Bethica hushed and gently licked at her face.

Scraping the drops from the wyrm's cheeks.

"Oh dear, you dragons and ver, always like children, with lives stretched over long. The stars have been so unfair to you both. To leave you children for lifetimes like this. Cry your tears you ancient child you. We will have seasons to prepare, I'm not going yet." Jewel nodded. The flame inside her burned hard. Crackling so much she started to fear opening her mouth lest the power of it rush free. Holding her tongue now out of the terror of what might be unleashed with her words.

None of this seemed right, but looking up at Bethica she struggled to gain control. If her friend who happily wished to die this summer? Feared to live beyond it even? What else could Jewel do?