16.7

Zyrdicia groaned as the last of her stomach's contents left her. She heaved blood in a grim torrent. Emptied, her stomach contracted one last time in protest of the abuse she had foisted upon it.

Behind her, a hissing sound marked the dragon's laughter.

"Fuck you," she mumbled, moving to the edge of a small spring. She knelt beside it and splashed her face with its tepid water. She then took a long drink, then sighed miserably. Her ribs were painfully sore now. The night's activity with the dragon, combined with the vomiting, left her torso aching. As though aggravating the incompletely healed wounds was not bad enough, she had also discovered that dragon dancing had very little thrill to it now that the threat of death was removed. Her new imperviousness to dying robbed her of the fun in her favorite sport.

"It's no wonder your stomach is upset," the great reptile remarked. "As bitter as humans taste, they give me indigestion too."

"They don't taste bitter."

"To you. Maybe that's your problem. You can't taste the bitterness until it comes back up!"

Zyrdicia sat down at the edge of the pool, staring pensively at her reflection in the moonlight. She felt much better now that her stomach had purged its contents. The nausea had been unbearable. She remembered hearing from the Old Priests long ago that a human could swallow a great quantity of blood without becoming ill. They were wrong -- as usual.

Tonight she had killed several hundred people in a few minutes. She had expected the bloodshed to help her mood. Instead it had unleashed a voracious hunger. She had gorged on her victims' blood until her stomach was ready to burst. She had occasionally imbibed human blood in the past, but never in a quantity like this. This was bestial and...she groaned again as the word occurred to her: demonic. It was not her hunger - it was Azriok's.

Tonight, the new, nauseating hunger for blood robbed her of the fun of another of her favorite sports. "Damn you, Azriok!" she whispered angrily, still staring at her own reflection in the water. "You ruin everything in life that entertains me. Do you expect boredom will drive me to you now?"

The dragon's sticky, forked tongue flicked against her shoulder, nudging her affectionately. Its enormous black head was a scant few inches from her body.

She leaned to the side, resting her own head against the black scales between its emerald eyes. "It isn't fair," she whimpered. "I don't want to be immortal. There is no thrill to anything if I can't risk death."

"You never really risked death before. You only pretended to," the dragon responded with characteristic frankness. "Nothing has changed."

"Everything has changed! The blood hunger was never like this!"

"But you still had it, sometimes," Roshor reminded her. "It's purely a question of degree."

She sighed, knowing the dragon was correct. The knowledge did nothing to lift her spirits. After her ordeal with Baal and Azriok, she wanted desperately to be held. She craved affection, if only to forget how much her psyche still ached from the torment. The disastrous end to the previous night in Karteia only made it worse. At that moment, it seemed Azriok had been right about that too - no mortal could ever be worthy of her. She idly imagined returning to unleash one of Zyr's Annihilation Spheres on Aparans, wiping Dirk and his precious continent out of existence, along with a large chunk of the rest of the material world.

For now, she was too depressed to bother with that fantasy or any other. The worst part of her melancholy was the sense of loneliness. She had nowhere amusing to go to divert her. She certainly had no desire to kill again anytime soon. Magnus would have been able to dispel the bitterness. Tonight she yearned for his unequivocal adoration, his relentless drive to make her happy and distract her from the darkness that defined her existence. His passing left her with a gaping hole in her world. For the first time in decades, she had no one to turn to as the darkness of her world opened up its jaws and sucked her in. She wondered sadly how she would be able to bear a world without Magnus' laughter and affection to distract her from the loneliness of being.